


Bellyache

by Neurtsy



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Animal Death, Blood, Blood Drinking, Death, Drowning, Gore, Horror, M/M, Other, Suicidal Thoughts, Undead, Vampires, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-23 15:23:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8332726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neurtsy/pseuds/Neurtsy
Summary: Louis is a vampire, Harry is a balloon vendor, they meet at dawn.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [louhearted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/louhearted/gifts).



> for my friendo Felix, who has the best prompts and most contagious enthusiasm. here's a little sneak of what's in store! (rough estimate for the rest of it getting posted - late october/early november)
> 
> Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/neurtsy/playlist/59182SGW9vDklSmXhTCcO6

In the air of the cemetery, the wind softly mourns. 

 

The night is still, coloured blue-black like deep waters and held breath. 

 

The starlight dead and distant, and the soft feel of feathers touches through dreams, the hint of nightmares, a shadow passing.

 

↶↶↶

 

The tide slides in, wordless and wretched, and with it comes the rhythmic sound of digging, the dull churning of soft earth. 

It goes on, the shovel held in a tireless grip, and a damp smell of decaying leaves and worm-trails seeps out into the night. 

 

A dull _thunk_ sounds out, and the wind scolds the outburst. 

 

Then the sound of digging changes. From the dry splay of a shovel to the smooth runnings of soil between fingers, handfuls at a time unearthed and cast away. 

 

A hinge, next. And then muscles coiling, deft hands making fast work of clothing, and cold young skin touching the night air. 

 

Then, there is all the silence of the sky, and lips brush softly against the shell of an ear. 

And again the wind blows, snaking through the trees like a whisper between lovers. 

 

Again, handfuls of soil come, this time replacing what was dug up. The shadowed movements are patient, with all the time in the world, hiding something back into the earth gently, with the soft weight of a tender secret.

 

↶↶↶

 

Everything is silver-lit when he awakes, but the darkness holds him dear, wrapped up inside.

 

His eyes won’t open, newborn and clammy, with the weight of something resting overtop his closed lids, and pressing galaxies into his skull. 

 

He stirs with a stale breath trapped against his tongue, and the rich and choking taste of earth pushing past his parted lips. 

 

Splinters and dirt lay beneath his nails and in the dips of his eyelids. Dark and dry pieces of earth filling his mouth - but not filling enough, and a tremble lights through his body, rack-thin and starved.

His arms swim, stiff and slowly waking, and they almost sink back into the ground as he tries to brace himself, and stand. 

 

Naked, his spine bullies his legs into rising. 

 

Soil rains from his body from where it had settled on his skin and in the spaces between his toes. 

He finds his footing, his legs unsure of their stance, in the company of small trees and stone angels. 

 

Shaken, hollow, he pivots, bare feet slipping and diving into the dirt as he sways. On all sides it seems to be the same - rows of grave markers, guarded by skinny and empty trees. The sky above so deep and dark and stretching down to meet the horizon, black and rippled. 

 

The headstone planted above where his body had risen from is flat, stoic, and it catches his eye with its sloping, dome-like shape. 

A name is etched into it, two dates, a quiet inscription, and the shape of them catches just beneath his breastbone. 

His fingers reach out as if invisible strings tugged gently by some puppeteer are walking him towards the motion, silently guiding. 

He stares at the name, sharply edged and near-white against the stone. So uniform and cut in monotone, but distantly, he can feel the shape of it extending like stretched fingers towards his ears. The slide of a woman’s voice, calling out, but it fades, and he’s left with the bitter taste of dirt. 

 

He decides it’s his own name, in the same way the sun decides to set. It doesn’t feel anything like a choice, but some deeply rooted, heavy _knowing,_ slow and steady, moving him towards the conclusion. 

It feels vast and churning, and uncontrollable. 

 

Something akin to panic is brewing there in the hollowness of his stomach. It creeps and crawls, making its way to his chest, where it tightens and cramps, breathless and strange.

 

The presence of the gravestones, and statues perched over some, scattered throughout the black, are serving as a terrible kind of company. Midnight lives in the creases of dried flowers at the base of quiet graves, and shadows across the faces of the stone angels, mute and watchful. 

Sad, carved eyes that his own eyes feel drawn to. The strange panic is breeding in his chest, and turning to terror under the pale scrutiny of their far-away gaze. Just as distant, the sound of a woman calling his name is ringing in his ears. 

 

He can imagine the mourning the carved eyes are reflecting. Images inside his head of black-clad figures dotted like boils across the raw-looking skin of the cemetery. 

He’s not sure the thoughts are his own, but he can feel the grief rising up from the grass, soaked deep into the soil beneath, and the roots of the trees growing along the edges. 

 

He has to turn away from the grey eyes, and the images they’re pushing into his skull, which feels heavy and lacking. 

Turning slides his eyes back onto the headstone, and the name he can’t dig from his ear canals, where it’s burrowed, swollen with insistent infection. 

Now he’s trapped again. 

Insectoid, his bare feet stuck and slick with amber, honey, hot tar. 

Eyes wide and frantic, all pale and pupil in the dark, drinking in a name and a set of dates. A name that nags inside his ears and chest, a date that feels like it should be familiar, and another that feels close by, a breath in the past, perhaps. Watching him from the shadows. 

 

The name on the grave watches him too. _Louis_ \- and he breathes it in, feels it wrap like rocks around his chest, drag him down, and he closes his eyes as it settles.

It’s barely anything, but it’s a star filled infinity more than nothing at all, and he opens his eyes again, taking in the whiteness of his bare feet, nestled in the dirty black of grave soil. 

 

The ground he stands on looks freshly tilled, but seeming to be neatly tucked in around the edges. And there at the base of the grave, just as neatly, a small stack of clothes. Black and smooth, like the outline of the sky, iron-pressed and waiting. 

 

He dresses himself, numbly. 

 

It isn’t until after his slow fingers have done up the buttons that he wishes he had first smoothed all the dirt from his skin.

 

↶↶↶


	2. Chapter Two

He stands. Skin like ice and dead air and unlined paper. 

Body upright and motionless, feeling the way the grime and creases touch his unlined and icy skin, awed and wordlessly perplexed in the aftermath of such nakedness. 

He stands and drinks in the blackness of the late hour, some dark and damaged newly emerged butterfly, wings drying, opening.

 

And when his eyes open too, pupils bottomless, colours seem to pop through the night. 

The strange ash-green of the grass, yellow tendrils clutched around the moon, and brighter, stronger, something red at the foot of the grave.

 

Red roses. Velvet petals curling, pricked stems closely bunched. 

The colour casts an ache that sounds through his fingertips, and they crawl to his arms, itching. 

 

Some dim part inside his skull lights up, _hunger,_ it says, and lower, his stomach twists and burns. 

He damps down the pressure collecting inside, some unfamiliar howling thing that lives in his skull now, and there’s pressure collecting in his mouth too. It walks hand in hand with the hollowness quaking in his chest.

 

There’s a path in the cemetery, narrow and neat, and he moves towards it, fluid and cautious, his feelings not quite trusting his feet. 

In return, his feet don’t seem to trust the rest of him, and they waver, all small bones and uncertainty, led by a strange pull at his core that seems to be beckoning, urging him along, coaxing him into action.

The pull seems insistent that he move away from the dirt he’s drawn himself from. More than that, it seems to be drawing him away from the hill behind the cemetery, a grassy rolling horizon, where trees with awfully angled branches stand. 

He doesn’t like to look at them, and he turns himself onto the worn out path.

 

Further, there’s a pale glow, distantly drawing him away from the headstones and fence work, and he follows the path out, spine sliding like shame beneath the unfamiliar clothes. 

The affected greenness of the shadowed ground tapers off into something less forgivable, and the change jars his feet, a little less fluid as the road winds on. 

The concrete disagrees with the fresh gloss of his shoes, fine leather and trim tailoring, virgin and unaccustomed to the grain and bite. 

Nevertheless, he walks, footsteps falling like powdered glass, tiny wisps of ash clouding up with each step. 

The ground itself feels like some bleak planet, dug up and carved over.

Somewhere, away, he can hear a dull roar, a wet pressure, from either inside his head or rolling towards him, off in the distance. 

 

A small seaside town, he decides, or some slowly waking part of his head seems to supply. The outskirts of a dirty city, and he feels an arrow towards the heart of it draw out from the centre of his own chest.

 

Something cracked and gumming has coated over his lips, and sits thick in the corners of his mouth. 

His tongue worms out, licking, the guise of having something to draw back in and have inside.

There’s a taste of disease, strange flesh.

 

All at once the emptiness of his stomach and his head stirs together with the darkness of the road, the hour and the dirt, and he strangles, gags, falls to his knees.

He tries to vomit, but the only thing inside is confusion and raw black panic - nothing to come up or out - and he shakes and stands with a quaking hollowness. 

 

The horizon, and the awful trees seem to still be right on his back, and with it he feels the paranoid presence of eyes, of animals in the dark, of pure hot fright that licks his bones and squeezes.

Ringing in his head are the sounds of a softly weeping scarce crowd, a woman wet and breathing the name that must be his, and the rustle of a body through the trees, the deliberate snapping of twigs underfoot.

 

His ears and his head can’t seem to focus or pinpoint the noises, overwhelmed with shocks of sound and fractured memories.

 

He can feel the terror on his back of some bright and terrible presence, and it digs in with clawed fingers. They hook and dig like spurs into his flesh, and he runs.

 

Leather shoes lick up a gritty scramble over the trail - he’s on some odd and wooded way, small stones turning to smaller stones, and the salted scent in the air tells him he’s being led to the sea.

The path he’s running on fakes to betray him, and for a moment he thinks he’s reached a dead end. The trail has tapered and abandoned him, and there’s a gap, a rocky decline that disintegrates into sand, into the sea. 

The feeling of some dread hot on his heels, and his stomach plummets, doomed and done for.

But the trail changes. A last minute and tacked on sharp turn, and then he’s flying down decrepit wooden stairs, the handrail crooked and jutting, some bent and busted old man’s backbone.

The unseen feel of being pursued hasn’t been shaken yet, and at the bottom of the stairs he’s now surrounded by jagged cliff faces, shoes dusted and swallowing sand.

All around him is the sound and smell of the sea, rampant and crashing, loud and luring.

It sounds like a distant fury, lethal in its rolling, washing coils, but he urges his panicked bones towards it. 

Down between the narrow stretch of cliff, past the decrepit remains of a boat, keeled over and rotting into the shore. 

The unseen thing on his back is all teeth, sinking into his marrow. The sand underfoot makes it hard to run, but he scrambles and stumbles, eyes wild and straining, the feel of steel jaws caught around a frantic limb, and an urge to start chewing, anything to get away, or to bleed out - an escape, no matter which.

Orange pelted and rabid, trapped in a caved den, the scream that forces its way up out from his throat is pure animal too, high and terrible, monstrous and enough to chill his own lungs into silence. 

His chest is a gasping and gaping hole, and there’s white noise inside his head screaming and urging himself to just run forwards, throw his body to the sea and be lost to the waves.

 

But something deeper, stronger, some lethal and impossibly calm voice inside his veins whispers, _no,_ and his body waits and listens.

 

A whisper; _stop,_ and his bones obey.

 

_Turn around,_ the strange vein-deep voice is saying. 

 

To turn around is to face the bright and terrible thing that’s hounded him to the sea, but his bones are sly and traitorous, and the leather of his shoes are lost in the sand as he pivots. 

 

All along the horizon some aching artist has run a paintbrush of red. It’s glossy and thick with clouds, the colour of blood, and his stomach is a shredded mess of teeth and nails. 

He staggers towards the shock of colour eating up the edges of the sky, all the while his manic head is shrieking for him to shield his eyes and reach the water, take a lungful. 

His eyes dart all over, caught in the redness that’s seeping into the clouds, blind with fear as the waves tuck and burn behind him. The thing that’s been stalking him feels too close for any semblance of comfort to be found, breathing hot and foul breath in his face. 

 

There’s nothing there but that red line of blotted ink, the darkened path he followed, and the wreck of a boat, all splinters and sagged bow. 

 

_There,_ that cold and coiling voice is whispering. The command is crawling from his pores and his feet are hot and screaming in his shoes, transporting him forwards. 

 

It’s a messy and mongrel instinct that takes over, and his limbs all move in disarray, tangling and competing on all fours until he’s half buried in sand, underneath the floor of the boat, hidden in the damp and the dark. 

 

A shadow passes, the sky lightens, and Louis loses consciousness.

 

↶↶↶


	3. Chapter Three

Waking is a terrible and torrential déjà vu that licks the creases from his eyes with a rough and feline tongue. 

 

Remembering and removing himself from the sorry shipwreck takes a burst of scrambled strength that lives in his palms and claws him to the surface, and the salt air.

 

Outside it’s cold, but he doesn’t feel the coldness touch his skin so much as he feels it sliding and breathing around him. _Like the fish must feel the water,_ he thinks, and imagines drowning. 

In the same way he can imagine the soft release of crying. A hard mass forms in his throat, pushing outwards, and stills.

In the sky are rolling clouds, and just the same, no rain comes. 

 

↶↶↶

 

He stands simply, mind a whirl of shapes and sounds like kaleidoscope blurs, and he tries and fails to make sense of them, skin swallowing the night air around him.

Out in the open again, the wind whips his hair around his face, creating a tangle, and finally ridding the stale, earthy smell, neatly combed against his scalp. 

Still shaken, but his hands hang still at his sides, and he wonders if the numbness is something stretched out over him like a second skin, or if it’s now rooted deeper.

His mouth aches softly too, the pain a new thing, bunched up and unravelling as his stomach whines and tightens. 

 

Up and over the hill, a light is beckoning him with hands outstretched and enticing. The colour is electric, a low hum of streetlamp orange, and not the terrible red horizon that had aided in him fleeing to the seaside.

This new and unignorable colour is pulling his feet to action, his body quiet but slowly lighting up inside in small bursts. Faulty wiring, lighting bugs. 

The waking cavity in his chest feels to be craving the light in a different but not deeper way than his stomach is craving to be less hollow. 

 

He walks over the empty corpses of horseshoe crabs, shoes sinking into the sand, as if the earth is passively encouraging him to sink too, join the skeletons, for them all to sleep there together. 

It’s a small pull he finds he can resist, unlike the beggar’s force drawing him towards the distant lights. 

 

↶↶↶ 

 

He follows the light, feeling hunger and ripples of madness singeing his insides like the flicker of a dying candle. 

Street lamps appear along the edge of the trail, tall and narrow, and glowing in lines that lead him along through the gloom. 

He doesn’t find himself in the mid of some city, but instead some strange alcove that’s all graveled sand, looking out to the sea again. 

The dark and hushed voice inside that had buried him under the ship seems to have become dormant again, but even through the silence, he can’t help but to feel that it’s the one leading him, calling the shots.

 

His footsteps are caught in a wander through the dark, all over the map, winding, but somehow so quiet and oddly focused. Guided by some unseen determination, like his feet and hands and synapses are sniffing out a trail, and at the end of the trail, there he is. 

 

A man, angelic and golden, a silhouette in the grey, all lines and curves and flushed cheeks, and Louis’ stomach twists and burns.

The night is singing a soft chorus around them, waves rolling like cellist’s fingers across a stretched-out neck, and Louis steps forwards through the gloom. 

 

He feels weak as he approaches, transparent and wilted, a glass vase, dying flowers, and the man won’t look at him, his eyes red around the edges, trapped watching the sea.

They’re still lit up around the seams by that further-off orange light, but even so, the blackness of the sea conquers.

 

The man turns his head, eyes blindly following some distant sound - his neck all hard and on display - and it’s the end. The last of Louis’ wits come dribbling from his ears to pool hot beneath his collar. 

He moves in, caught in a strange stumble, a fire in his belly and something deeper begging to be quenched.

Hands flash out and grab the man’s wrists, and he thinks - thoughts clouded like water stained glasses - that they can’t be his own hands. He doesn’t want them to be his hands.

But the hands have caught tight around the man’s forearms, and nails catch like steel traps, sinking into the skin there, and holding tight. 

There’s a sharp shift inside his mouth, not quite a sting, but a slide, and a bright white _pop_ of pressure releasing. 

With the release of pressure comes another shifting, this time of their posture, moving seamlessly from a violent struggle to a smothered and intimate cradling of the man’s body, large and built from layers and layers of meat, but somehow powerless in Louis’ grip. 

One hand moves up on its own without Louis’ command, and strangles the forming scream into silence. 

 

The hands he doesn’t want to be his twist the man’s neck to the side - the dip of a dancer lowering their lover to almost brush the floor. 

Any flicker of right or reason flee from his head like rats abandoning a sinking ship, and hunger takes over entirely. 

 

He closes his mouth around the man’s throat. Beneath his lips he can feel a pulse, pure horror pounding out desperate, final words, morse code screaming and pleading to be freed, released, for mercy.

No mercy comes. Instead, dagger-sharp and inhuman teeth saw through the skin of the man’s neck, messily shredding through flesh. A spray of red leaps out from the confines of his jugular, again and again, finally slowing, dwindling, turning to a red-black drizzle. 

 

The grey and calculating voice in Louis’ head holds the reins in pulseless fingers, and commands his mouth to latch on to the gaping hole it’s bitten, and drink, swallow, gorge. 

Dimly, he can feel the man go limp and lifeless, all fight and breath banished from his body, and again Louis’ hands move on their own accord - or the accord of that awful voice - and cup just beneath the man’s collarbone, squeezing and coaxing the last throatfuls of blood to spill into his mouth.

When he’s finished, finally full, the corpse drops gracelessly to the sand. The blood that touches the ground turns it a strange pink in the dark. It’s a colour too delicate for Louis to fathom through the wild and rampant fire that spreading inside and consuming his frame. 

The thought of pink delicacy is lost to the flames. 

Another strange thought, out of place and stirring his face into a panicked laugh of madness worms in. A sudden flash of worry and disgust, picturing germs and diseases crawling past his lips, burrowing through his veins. 

It’s another thought that comes and passes, washed away by the flood of electricity swarming through his body like hot circuits. 

 

Reality, or some black and twisted version of it, comes creeping in to meet him once again. Standing in the grit and sand, staring at a body, muscles singing as he stands. The vessels have burst in the dead man’s eyes, and they stare lifelessly up at Louis, accusing and frozen in feral panic. Louis stares lifelessly back, nerves and fingers never feeling so alive, and that dark and dreadful voice inside begins to whisper.

_Tide’s pulling out,_ it says, and Louis’ eyes are dragged to the shoreline and caught in the waves. 

 

_Tide’s pulling out, taking everything with it._

 

It slowly clicks what the voice is saying, and Louis’ hands, decorated with a sticky red coating, creep down just as slow, and hook into the man’s clothes. 

 

It’s easy dragging the corpse down to the water, and the tireless crawling waves lap it up and draw it out. 

 

He watches as the limbs are slowly eaten by the water. 

 

Thoughts of pathogens and infection spreading past his lips threatens the confines of his mind and he staggers, again onto his knees. He wretches, willing the syrupy copper flavour to come back up again, and flower out into the sand. 

But his stomach seems to have settled, esophagus sealing closed and refusing to give anything back, and he rises.

Then he runs. 

What starts out as a slouched and strangled stumble now bleeds into a silken gallop, feet burning a path over the sand away from the water.

 

Eventually the sand tapers off and becomes the soulless grey of concrete. 

Gasoline staining and spiraling out in colours uncontrolled, bleeding into the cracks like regret. 

 

He slows, an afterthought in the back of his head encouraging him to catch his breath, and he realizes it hasn’t been lost at all. 

The only breath he can find at all seems to be the kind rising from sewer grates. Awful gasps of steam silvering up and disappearing into the night air. 

 

He raises a hand to his face, steadying and straining, and as his palm brushed over his lips, they come away stained with pink trails. Something feels out of place inside his mouth, and just as the sensation solidifies, his tongue pushes a ratting of teeth past his lips, and he spits them onto the pavement. 

Staring numbly, he dimly claims then as his own. Human and discarded. As he stares, he can feel the sharpness of a new push inside, and as he places his fingertips to his gum line, he feels the forming of new ones, surfacing like sharks.

 

The glossy shells of teeth along the ground trail like breadcrumbs to where he finally rests, a narrow alley lined with brick and black buildings. 

There’s a small nook, a step back from the rest of the wall, and he wedges his body into it - some weird idea of shelter, and the smell in the air is abandoned. 

 

His eyes close on their own accord, and the insides of his lids are alit with red and power and sickness.


	4. Chapter Four

He wakes, again into the same black nightmare, and rises slowly, limbs alive with dark energy.

His first conscious thought is a distant alarm, dismay at how the sun had caught up so fast, and sealed his lids closed. 

His mind and his tongue are both unwilling to give a name to his happenings, but it rings rampant in his ears. His newly formed teeth - straight and narrow human guises - click together, as if spelling it out behind his lips. 

He gets up in one stiff movement, not quite accepting but unable to deny the goings on. 

He feels the tension ooze from his back, body stretching awake, still glowing with the embers of the night before, and he sets to kill himself before the next sunrise. 

 

↶↶↶ 

 

He finds his feet begin to draw to the sea again. 

 

He walks, unsure if it’s the bloodied sand from his victim - his mind doesn’t want to call it a meal, but the word slips into his mind, insisting, as the weight lies heavy in his guts.

 

Still, he walks, drawn by something, nonetheless. Drawn to the tide, pulling him in, a blue promise, a long horizon. 

 

↶↶↶

 

His limbs move slowly, built by a quiet patience; tireless. Walking the same dark trail for what seems like hours now, unknowing of how fast or how far he had run the night before, freshly fueled. 

 

It’s cold, too early and too late in the year for the thinness of his shirt to stave off the weather. Cold enough to shiver, to see breath, but he can’t see his own. 

Cold, and he hates that he can’t feel it, as if his skin has forgotten how to shake and pucker. 

 

↶↶↶

 

The rain begins as he walks. The first drops light up the patching grass at the edges of the trail, small and shining. 

 

There’s a twinge of colour to the sky - greenish, lightening, and the wind comes snaking along like cherry syrup, cloying and hard to swallow. 

 

There’s a smell too, brine and grit, and it attaches itself to the roof of his mouth, clinging with small barbs to his throat and his tongue.

 

Fog is rising and rolling from the earth. Louis imagines it’s the ground, sighing and breathing, and it turns to a cold-breathed exhale, mocking him for standing lungless and unchanged by the cold. 

 

He tries to defy and breathe it in. A forceful, violent expansion of his chest, a sharp intake. 

The air is thick and sweet smelling outside, but runs thinly from his nostrils as he exhales - a ghoulish sensation that feels unnecessary and purely habitual. In it lies a small comfort that the action is still at all possible, but it’s a comfort that fades as the path winds on. 

 

↶↶↶

 

The beach lies waiting for him, cliff walls like outstretched arms. A grating embrace for his return. 

 

He doesn’t let his eyes seek out the darkened patch of sand, but he can smell it, overpowering and stuffing itself down his throat, even as the rain pounds and tries to dilute it. 

 

The clashing sound of the rain into the ocean is a roar inside his ears. Clamor and conflict, and he wants to dive into the midst of it. 

 

He begins to remove his clothes, like some strange and meticulous ritual. His thin jacket drapes to the ground where is lies like a sodden shadow at his feet.

He fights out of his shoes, soft leather and a size too large, and stares down in the dim at his bare feet. His toes sink into the gravel, unbothered by the scratch and scrape. They’re smooth and pale and he’s not convinced they are his own. 

 

He stands and pretends to breathe some more, willing some sense of finality to join the air and catch hold inside. All it does is brew a mixture of swelling and nausea, like trapped gas inside his chest. 

His eyes run shrieking past the shore, cast out like fishing line into the deep and dark, searching through the waves for a sign of hope or solace. 

He finds there’s nothing there but the crushing tide and heavy rains. 

 

↶↶↶

 

Standing, swaying, the rotting insides of his skull try to call up memories. What they can find in damp corners are shadowed faces and warped voices that feel much too far away. Figures held by hair-thin strings like marionettes, fragile forming in his head, with the thought that a mild breeze would cast them out and they would vanish entirely. 

He can hear the soft calling of a woman again, his name a distant tremble. The feel the warm press of a hand to his forehead, the pressing of lips to his hair, and then it’s gone entirely, and the beach comes flooding back. 

 

His eyes ease closed, lashes fanning spider shadows across his cheeks. Again he mimes breathing and finds it joyless, willing for death to come and present itself before him, waiting, the sign and urge to take the plunge and finally be still. 

 

A blink of colour lights up in the corner of his eye, and he turns his head, gears greased and sliding with cold grace. 

In one wild moment behind his eyes, he catches it, imagines it as Death, as a burning ball of light, the sun and the end. He inflates his lungs and turns his palms outwards at his sides. 

 

He laughs instead of dying, a sound he wasn’t sure he could still make. It’s a bloodless noise, grey and metallic. 

 

The sun is a yellow balloon, caught in the wind, moving like organs beneath skin. It’s caught in the spiral of the strange cliff-lined ocean air, whipping through, circling the rocks. 

 

It’s so surreal, so unexpected and unfair that he doesn’t notice when his feet first turn to follow it. It’s only when the rush and roar of the waves are at his back instead of cursing into his eyes that he realizes he’s following the plastic shape, towards the city outskirts and the inevitable sunrise.

 

The water surges and drags itself up and down the beach, navy and sunk deep with power and forgiveness. There is a bone-deep ache inside him to rush into it, to drown and sleep amid the rocks and wrecks along the bottom. 

A blue and welcoming death, while the pressure of the rising sun feels merciless, his roots turning to flames that shriek for him to stay away from the dawn. Strange instincts that still feel unfamiliar and fresh, like wet paint across his skin. They feel impossible to disobey.

But he can still feel the weight of the corpse, and the grainy give of the sand as he dragged it to the water. The struggle leaving the body still feels fresh and pleading beneath his hands. 

 

He sets his path, and chooses the terror instead. 

 

The balloon seems to dip and tease him, just ahead, skimming along the grit and sand. Alive with a feist that isn’t present in his own feet, nimble but dragging. He can see the currents rocking in the air, and feels a bone-deep knowing that the plastic shape is being strangled through the air, and carried back above the ground.

He follows the shape as it bobs and blurs through the barely-lit gravel.

A moan picks up in his head and his ears, a grisly blend of the wind and the ocean, and the stirring and swelling of catlike shrieking in his skull. It rises and falls in uneasy harmonies with the taste of blood and dirt, copper and guilt. 

 

The balloon is winding through the dark before him, caught in a slow circle, and slipping back up the way it must have come, temporarily caught and trapped by the half-tunnel of cliffs in the same way he had been. 

It serves as some canary messenger that seems to be leading him perfectly to the curtain of colour touching the far horizon. The ache and screeching picks up inside his sternum again, some livid and ancient noise insisting that he head in any other way. 

 

He finds the strength to push past and ignore it. It’s set in his jaw and his guts to deliver himself to the sunrise, the promise of blisters and agony lighting his path. It’s a path that takes him through a maze of narrow alleys and buildings that seem too tall for the nowhere patch of city. 

 

The sun is almost just beneath the crest of buildings, and the sky and clouds have gone a sallow grey. 

A hushed voice inside picks up, akin to the howling commands to flee from the light he’s trying to ignore. It slimes words of caution into Louis’ ear. 

_You’re not alone,_ it says, and theres no comfort to be drawn from it. 

 

A man stands beneath a lamp stand that’s connected by ancient wires to a generator. Beside that, a patchy trailer hitch, a newspaper stand.

Louis freezes at the sight of him, muscles swiftly turning to glass, playing statue in the shadows of the lanky buildings.

The balloon drifts further upwards, knocking itself against the rough brick of the building, until it disappears over the top, forgotten by Louis, who stands stopped dead and transfixed.

 

Under the delicate light of the lonely lamp stand, the man’s skin is lit up in sick yellow. It’s the colour of infection and hot oil, and Louis wants the taste of it mashed up against his lips, shoved rough up under his gums. 

 

Louis stares. He doesn’t know for how long, or how to stop, and the fading shadows hold him tight.

Finally, perhaps an eternity later, the man looks up, alert and searching, and in the strange grey pale of the almost-morning, his face and outline are all done up in pink.

His mouth, ears, and the pads of his fingers.

 

Such a soft hue, and so inviting amid the dark and chill, and Louis steps forward, closer to the warmth amongst the gloom. 

Closer now, the colours emanating from the figure seem almost sharp in their vibrance, eyes alive in powdered greens. 

Louis takes another step towards him, and feels the fevered light spill over his face, and the pink suddenly feels all too much like red, and the hot slick fire feeling of blood comes rushing at him from all sides. 

 

Louis breathes in red, out blue, as if some semblance of colour had returned to him too. 

 

When the man looks over and spots him at last, there’s a cold and small moment where Louis sees himself in the way he’s being seen.

Wan and white and seeming to favor his left side, standing in a hunch, feet pale and bare.

Nothing at all capable about him, and it’s not fear but worry that passes the man’s face. 

 

“Are you alright?” he asks, a pearly gentle tone, and Louis can’t stand it, wants to shred the gentleness off of him. 

He’s not rippling and caving with hunger this time, but the urge still lives inside his wrists and his spine, and his teeth tighten and push against one another inside his mouth as he grits them closed.

His silence descends, coating them both in a blend of waking colour, and he watches in the greying light as the yellow threatens to spill past the buildings.

 

The man responds to the silence with a quiet of his own, watchful and unafraid, and his hands speak for him. Long pale fingers, winding and stretching, pulling shapes from nothing, tying and twisting knots until they’re holding a small creature, shiny and straining. 

The man extends his arm in a slow flourish, a quiet cautiousness there in his eyes, gaging and deep. 

 

Louis’ eyes ooze from the pale green of the man’s eyes to the pale and pink flesh of his hands, and the carnal red of the animal held in them, four legged and snouted.

 

A balloon animal, the plastic edges barking against the man’s hands as he waits, patient, offering it to him. 

 

Louis finds his feet, and flees from the man and the morning. 

 

↶↶↶


	5. Chapter Five

Waking proves he didn’t flee fast enough. He’s on the ground, caught tight between the looming walls of two buildings. One arm is splayed out where it fell, and bleary eyed in waking, he can see where the line of the sun had fallen. The exposed skin of his arm is a angry, pussing pink colour, with white pockets puffed up and oozing. 

There’s pain, too. He laughs out a stretch of relief, and it dribbles from the corners of his mouth as his brain catches up to his state. He tries to stand, and finds the pain blossom out, and catch hold tight of his insides. The gnawing empty grate of his stomach is starting up again as he sways, and finds his balance in the black. Colours are coming to him slower, too, sliding to the back burner as his arm spikes and howls, a peeled and squirming breed of suffering. 

He turns his head towards a sound in the night - harsh metallic against concrete - and finds his ears honing in on the clatter. It rings inside his head, the weighty promise of something living, something breathing almost within reach. 

He doesn’t mean for them to, but his feet slip into pursuit towards the sound. He’s still barefoot, and the texture of the concrete beneath his toes is cold and strange. 

 

He tracks the noise down and out of the alleyway, pausing at the edge, unwilling to step into the open street, and offer his body to the many openings of fellow alleyways and things hidden in the dark. 

His legs have picked up a restless stride, and his shadow slides and blends into the pavement, wandering out breathless into the night. _Breathless,_ and he wonders distantly if he has enough breath left to bother trying to catch. 

 

Another sound squirms out of the darkness and finds him. It’s a meaty and ugly noise, some wet weight, some dragging scrape. 

Louis hugs tight to the creases where the buildings meet the dirty ground, creeping, wary. 

A distant, dismal street light on the corner casts out sick and yellow shadows.

There’s a shape, unmoving in the middle of the road, and Louis’ mind whines, feeling the path of his feet drawing him towards it, but not wanting to.

 

Lying twisted on the asphalt is the stiff and mangled corpse of a cat. Louis stares at it, eyes fixing in and picking out the texture of the stretched skin and matted fur in the dark. Its mouth is hung open, teeth like pinpricks of battered starlight, and runny maroon blood has drained out from inside and spoiled the concrete. 

The smell of animal blood, congealed into pockets in the concrete invades his sinuses, staining the roof of his mouth into prickled boils. 

It’s an old carcass, legs barking out in rigor mortis, toes bent and bizarre. It’s not fresh enough to elicit any desire in him, but he forces himself past the body in fear of wanting it. 

 

The squirmy meat sound is still calling out through the grime of the night, and Louis’ toes are still itching in the grime to chase after it - a dog frothing for car tires, and he can practically taste the drag pushing through his gums.

His steps cough up flat fleshy sounds against the ground as he walks, and as the next too-far-spread streetlight appears, his stomach drops and curls at the sight of another blackened mound in the road. 

He knows it’s another twisted body before he slinks close enough to see it, written up with shadows and sunken in. Another small animal, he registers. A cat, or something partially catlike, with a thin drawn out spine and sharp teeth bared up at the sky. Ropes of pale intestines have been forced backwards out of its bowels, a messy pile of released pressure, but Louis feels no relief looking down at the creature. His feet walk him past the gore, and carry him further down the street. He finds himself grateful for the stillness of his lungs, unwilling to breath in the smell of death. But he finds it already welded to the roof of his mouth.

His own insides clench and ache as he walks, already seeing a shape waiting for him, this time angled more to the side of the road, placed deliberately in his path.

As he approaches, he picks out the difference to this third shape almost all at once. 

It’s still alive. Not for long, and not at all savable, he picks out at once. His eyes get tangled in the strange ways its moving, and for a moment he’s blind to the scent leeching out into the air. 

The creature is curling inwards and then outwards in motions too slow to be anything but agony. Consciousness slowly fading out to anatomical reactions, and all the while bleeding out onto gasoline stained pavement. There’s a knife - this cruel daggerish thing - dropped carelessly and intentionally beside the caving animal. Placed so easily and obviously, and looking at it, Louis places the drawn out clattering sound, and matches it to the metal.

Then the smell cuts in, and with it a gruesome squeezing of his stomach that feels closer to arousal than anything he’s felt since rising from the soil. It’s coated thickly with disgust, and an afterbirth-thick shame that curdles in his mouth.

He backs away, and feels the swollen chasm of his throat. He leaves the knife fallen on the ground - he tells himself he doesn’t want the crime staining his own palms, silencing the moan inside his chest that wants to cradle it, and lick the colour from the serrated edge. 

 

There’s a sound coming from further down, into the streets and the belly of the city, the downward spilling guts of the world. Paired with the spilling sound is the spilling of light, and Louis knows that that is the way to people. His mind stutters the word _meat_ in afterwards, or before; he can’t quite tell, the intrusive thought sliding in like pencil shading. 

He’s crushed with the feeling of something evil and grey looming over his head, black cats dead and dying, curbside, and he backs away from the promise of feeding. Superstitions he’s never held onto flanking his actions and pulling him back into the night. 

The colours that seep through the darkness are fleeting and absurd, and he has trouble keeping his eyes fixed in solid lines, instead his gaze rampant and unease, flickering from spot to spot, searching out movement and danger, noises and scents filtering like road flares.

 

Yellowness calls to him as his gait slips into something with intent - parts inside his head imploring he distance himself from the blood and ruin now behind him, and parts insistent that he turn and rush in, teeth bared and shameless. 

Yellow flowers in window boxes that he can’t explain, can’t understand how the chill hasn’t claimed them in the way it’s claimed his skin, and his thoughts. The same colour is cast down like halos from the lampposts, the pale light drawing small dark creatures from the gloom. 

Moths are flitting in long and unhinged circles around the lamp light, catching the yellowness on their wings and devouring it. Their transparency catch his eye and Louis follows their patterns through the night, hungrily. 

He scolds himself for the wave of shock when his wrists flash out on their own accord, and his palms press together, capturing the dust and flutter. 

The crushed body between his fingers leaves a smear of shimmer across his life lines, and he licks the traces of irony away. It goes down bitter, green velvet and painkillers, and he swallows, trying to crush away the desire to hunt out something hot and liquid and afraid instead. 

The moths don’t flee as he feeds upon them, disgusted with himself, but it’s a cleaner kind of disgust. One he knows he wouldn’t be feeling had he lowered his mouth to the twisted corpses on the pavement, and while shameful, without guilt. 

It feels like something inside him is being sustained, and he chokes down the bitterness, trying to in turn choke down the hotness building, urging him to chase down the human sounds in the narrow streets, and strike. 

 

Sated, but not fulfilled, he lets the ebb of the night carry him off, pointing his toes away from the misery strewn across the pavement. 

The morning is coming. He can feel time slipping off his shoulders, and his body wants no part of it. The strange chill in the air is still circling him, his skin tough and unbothered, but he finds some part inside is still pretending to be alive and tender, flesh still wanting to be tended to. 

All at once he’s filled with that same blue and overpowering urge to be at the seaside. His toes curl against the grain of the road, catching dirt between them, wanting to feel sand instead. 

 

↶↶↶

 

But at the beach he finds only small stones that dig holes into the bottoms of his feet. 

 

↶↶↶

 

He finds his discarded shoes where he left them the night before, keeping dark company with the fading patch of reddened sand. A careless mistake, but he finds he’s careless too, tired. 

He listens to the roar and pull of the waves, and imagines them inside his veins, mimicking life, blood flow in the place of hollowness. 

 

Up above, clouds are weeping snow intermittently. Louis could have sworn it was too early for snow, but then he can’t be certain. He’s simply not sure how long he’s been dead. The thought surfacing in his head feels pale and flaking too.

There comes a nag inside his head that hisses a warning, telling him he’s being foolish, leading tracks to and from his crime. And - thinking of the twisted cats - someone else’s crime. Too much death for coincidences to live among. There’s someone else who knows, something that’s been watching him, that he can’t pick out of the surrounding trees and cliffs. 

A driving force beneath his bones carries him back into the city, just along the edge. He passes the alley he roused himself from earlier, and his arm clenches in a twisted burn at the thought of staying there again. 

He passes by the trailer hitch and propped up stand - his mind slurs out _danger,_ and he looks around with paranoid eyes, finding nothing but slowly waking shadows at first.

But then, as the sun’s first fingers of light begin to reach out for him, yellowed wallpaper glue stretching out from the horizon, he finds a shape stirring, poised and breathing just as he expected.

Louis can feel the weight of the bags beneath his eyes, the colour of a bruised ego, skin stretched thinly. It’s a weight that bolts itself to his body, and slows him, keeps him from sinking into safely in the shadows still lingering.

The shape unfolds, and turns into a man, all outlined in pink and making Louis’ skin crawl and beg. 

 

“You’re hurt,” the man says. His voice is a crumble of letters that blur together and reach out for Louis, imploring.

Louis doesn’t deny it, feeling the burned raw flesh of his arm gasping out towards the man, craving to match their pinkness together. 

“Do you need some help getting clean?” It’s a soft terror of words, and Louis shivers at the drag of them, each tremble of his flesh feeling involuntary and betraying. 

_Some help getting clean,_ and he hadn’t known he was dirty. 

_Some help getting clean,_ and suddenly he feels dirty down to his soul. 

 

The man’s face is an earnest sketch of worry, of kindness hidden, beaten down by the early hour. Time ticks by like the crawling of insect legs, small and fast and itching. Louis can see the thoughts flickering in the near-pitch light illuminating the man’s eyes - an ashen, earthworm colour in the dark. The thoughts he sees are careful, but lacking the fear that Louis wishes was present, some immediate knowledge and gut-rooted instinct to back away. Instead it’s Louis that backs away, knees begging to buckle under the waves of scent, warm flesh and unsurfaced blood, seasoned by the salt held in the air. 

 

“Come,” the man finally says, as if prompted by the sight of Louis slinking backwards to be devoured by shadow. He beckons with slow muscles. Louis traces the ripple with his eyes, and salivates. 

“It’s going to get infected.” Louis blinks at the thought, and entertains the possibility. It seems far stretched and far less worrisome than the threat that’s blooming in his mouth, needle-sharp and unfurling.

“No,” Louis says, the first out loud word that’s bubbled to his tongue since his death, and it comes out white and sliming, a maggot mouthful. _“No,”_ he repeats, a squirming larvae syllable that’s aimed towards the clenching waves of craving in his stomach, and not the man who’s weighing the blisters on his arm with such intent and furrowed brows. 

“Here, just let me - ” The man reaches out for him, and Louis stutters backwards, legs moving in stumbled shock at the reversal of roles, this upright casing of pinkmeat pursuing him, his own body petrified by the advance and unable to fall into an escape. 

The heat and weight and pressure of a hand placed on the bicep of his uninjured arm is a white hot sear through his skull and stomach. The reaction in his body is instantaneous - his skin pulls tight around his bones and sinew like the pulling back of shower curtains, and the stance he adopts is akin to someone naked and sopping, exposed and unable to control the expression spreading across his face like flames. Hunger and desire, licking out in peach and ambers, a flare up of unadulterated wanting. It takes ever knot of strength wound tight in Louis’ spine to rein in it and pull further back, but the pressure in his mouth still caves, and paints his tongue crimson like a puckered canvas. 

The man misinterprets - or perhaps interprets correctly - and gently raises his hand from Louis’ arm, careful and poised, his hand a winged danseur taking flight. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice as soft and merciless as the breaking dawn. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” 

A laugh threatens its way into Louis’ throat and he wolfs it down, ravenous. 

“I’m not afraid,” he says in place of laughing. _I wish you were,_ he wants to say, but not nearly as strongly as he wants to bury his face in the man’s neck, all teeth and tongue. 

“You’re shaking,” comes the response. The man is still holding his hand in the air between their skin, extended from his body as if he’s still experiencing the tremor he caught from Louis’ arm. The words come wound with a trail of vapour from the man’s lungs, pink grey and expanding inside his chest. 

It’s cold, Louis knows, just as he knows the cold isn’t the reason he’s shaking. 

“Let me wrap that,” the man says, and the pressure of the sun threatening down below the horizon at Louis’ back forces him to comply, because his only other choice is to turn and run into the night alone and wait for the dawn. 

“It’s alright,” Louis says, a porous lie that sticks like medicine to his tongue. The man’s eyes catch the lie and let it be. Instead he walks back to the small trailer hitch, opening the door - and it sings on its hinges. Louis watches him walk. There’s something, perhaps the much too early hour, that hooks weights to the man’s shoulder blades, and drags down his gait. Watching him disappear into the narrow doorway feels like watching sand slip through his fingers, and Louis’ stomach and legs lurch forward to follow against his will. 

He finds his feet stall at the doorway, something twisting like rusted nails in his gut, and he stops, stands, looking inside. The man is lit up amber now, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a golden spider lowered by silk spreading webs of yellow orange across the interior. 

“It’s alright,” the mans says when he catches sight of Louis’ frame, lit in shadows from the silence of the night outside. He’s taken Louis’ own words and reshaped them into some degree of honest thought. “Come inside.” The nails are pried from Louis’ gut and he steps in, feeling more like prey than he could have imagined ever feeling again. The safety of the man feels so at risk, his flesh exposed and willing, and Louis clasps his hands together just beneath his stomach, in hopes of keeping the urge clamped down deep inside. 

“Here,” the man says, somehow still not seeing the danger of the small and shaken presence sharing the space with him. “Bring it under the water a minute.” Louis looks, and there’s a sinkful of water waiting, clear and trembling. The man places his own fingers just below the surface, as if showing some nervous child there’s nothing to fear.

_Take a dip,_ those fingers are saying, and the wet shape of the man’s wrist catches the yellow bulb light just so, and paints it up so decadent and inviting. Louis can imagine the flick of the pulse beneath the skin, and it uncurls the claws in his throat.

 

“What’s your name?” Louis asks. The words come out harsh and toothy, and he sucks his lips closed again, hiding the pointed gasps that have been unsheathing themselves from the roof of his mouth. It’s an attempt to turn the flesh before him back into a person, something living and holding on to an identity.

“It’s Harry,” the man says, and there’s a cloudy pause where Louis waits for a surname. It doesn’t come, and the man closes his mouth, a slight wrinkle deepening between his brows. He reaches out his still wet fingers instead, an impatient but slow beckon for Louis to step closer. 

 

His arm goes under the water quietly, and without struggle. Louis watches, fascinated by the shade of the man’s arm next to his - golden honey and sunlight on sandcastles. Shadowed by the raw red pigmented colour of his own - bed sores and insect bites, corpse white and poreless. 

The broken skin gets a fast once-over. A dunk and soak and the dead skin - perhaps now twice dead, Louis ponders - gets scratched away by a coarse cloth. There’s a quiet feeling inside of watching flesh and almost-blood, and clotting, and feeling anything that isn’t hunger and want.

Out of the water, the man dabs at the dampness on the exposed flesh. The tender motion of the man’s tendons beneath his skin causes a whirlwind of small motions inside Louis’ stomach, hunger and want, hunger and want. The moths acting up inside, wings flapping in the bile. 

 

The man leaves his side for a moment. Louis’ head feels hazy and wired with thoughts of the approaching morning, but he can’t find the motive in his legs to flee the scene. The presence of flesh and company has him cornered and salivating. 

 

“This part is going to hurt,” comes a sorry and sympathetic warning. Louis wants to laugh at the notion, especially voiced by something so peach coloured and vulnerable, but instead remains silent. His impostor incisors and canines have been dropped from his gum line, and sit atop his tongue. He worries speaking would rattle them, and expose him.

The man comes back, holding a small white kit of something in his hands. Louis is distracted by the spread of his fingers - pale and ripe against the plastic. The hands remove a bottle of something - antiseptic, Louis’ brain fills in - and Louis bites down against another rolling wave of nauseous craving. 

The man apologizes again, after swabbing a thick pad of gauze and coming back towards Louis. The closeness of their skeletons makes him nervous, mentally forcing himself to place value on the quiet life before him, slamming a name back into the cracks.

The man - Harry - presses a palm to Louis’ upper arm. It’s a steadying brace, applied pressure to comfort and warn, and all Louis feels is blood beneath skin, a wet weight soaking into his shirt. 

Pain doesn’t really seep in as the clear burn is dabbed along his wounds. Instead, the sensation of some other kind of burning, a red sizzle, chemicals eating through the sick and heading for the bone beneath. Louis finds he doesn’t mind it, incasing sharp blisters of nerves and pulling the offense of his mind away from the flesh beside him. 

It dawns on Louis - not bright and terrible, but slow and stony - that the man hasn’t asked what happened. Instead, his eyes are fixed and woodsy, caught up on cleaning the ugliness stretched on Louis’ skin. The determination and lack of fear feels unnatural to Louis, calculated and strange.

The burning finally starts to taper off and Louis blinks, vision slurred but needle sharp at the centers, and with tunnel vision he watches the man go back to the plastic case and take out a roll of bandaging. 

“Here,” that pink and rolling voice is saying to him, “here, it’s nearly done.” Louis nearly responds, but a wave of terror like the tide catches him first. It’s the night that’s nearly done. The first threats of sunlight are thinning and greying their way into the trailer, skeleton hands reaching out towards the two figures. One of them pulls away. The movement unravels the bandaging, and it tumbles to the floor. 

“I have to go,” Louis says, his feet fishlike in their scaled scurry to the exit. Inside his head and his chest a voice is screaming variants of the same thing. _I have to go, I have to leave, I have to get out of here._

“Let me finish this,” the man is saying, his hands falling to his sides, and then to floor to group and gather the fallen bandages. “It’s almost done.” 

“No,” Louis’ says, one fast exhale and his fingers mold around the door handle, pull it open. 

“You’ll get an infection,” the man says. There’s a weight to his tone. A lilt of _stop protesting,_ but the screaming in Louis’ head won’t settle, and the sun is rising. Louis doesn’t say that he suspects he can’t get infections anymore. His tongue trembles with the temptation but the crescendo of fear won’t let him do anything but back away, needing to find shelter. His hand is on the door handle, his feet are stepping out, into the almost-light, and he feels almost free. 

 

“Please, sir, your aura,” the man says, voice suddenly pale and pleading, a waver to it that slithers up Louis’ core and grips him tight. “Please. It’s so silver, let me help you.”

The strangeness of the words slide like dread and needles into Louis’ skin, and it’s the final snap that breaks him into an off kilter run, away from the man and the trailer and the dawn.

 

↶↶↶

 

The heels of his shoes scrape down the path to the beach, leaving tiny scabs of leather on the rock face.

The cliffs meet in a jagged point, and hold a small hollow of cave, grey and gloomy and wide enough to hide a body - a hangover of rock. 

Louis can still feel the man’s hands as if they left unseen prints on his arms. Pink toned and warm with the motion of blood running beneath the surface. He settles into the rocks, remembering the warmth of hands, and the moan that trickles out from between his parted lips is salted and wind chafed and so easily disguised as pain. 

↶↶↶

He sleeps. And dreams, of his skin turning grey, mottled and dusty like moth wings, paper thin and translucent, and finds his insides to be stuffed full of rubber organs and plastic tubes of coiling intestines. The words _‘please, it’s so silver,’_ wrapping around him like a crushing weight.

All the while cats are wailing, hissing around him, shrieking in heat.


	6. Chapter 6

Waking up is a sudden submerging into cold water. The spray from the ocean has crept up on him, leading foamy lines like trailing fingerprints up to where his body has been wedged. The sun seems to have left him be, but as he stands and his bones protest, he finds the pus and scales still present and burned into his skin. It’s a dead and wretched smell, old blood and skin, and it assaults his senses and chokes him up. 

He’s very nearly trapped himself in with the tide. In the dark with the waves so close, his unfocused eyes are accompanied with a vein deep ache of _you can’t stay here,_ and he stretches himself out from his hiding spot and soaks his feet in the wet sand.

 

It’s a shallow slog to shore. 

 

The water in his shoes makes him itch once he’s up the trail, high and not quite dry. He spends a moment trying to pick apart the feeling. Physical sensation, or something conjured up by the dusk-fresh part of his mind. The almost-human part, he finds. The night uncoils around him and he loses hold of it. 

He sets off walking, set to leave the trail and the cliffs, and off to an angle, the jagged pier, behind him.

 

There’s something itching inside too, and when he goes to scratch and pull at the fabric coating his chest, he looks and finds his cuticles outlined with blood. He’s not sure where it’s come from, or if it should hurt - and if it’s his at all. He’s not sure if he’s still got blood inside at all. 

He reaches the peak of the beach trail and can see the street lamps in the distance forking out the trailer to the city. It’s close enough to taste, even past the invisible layers of peeled flesh and seawater clogging his tongue, and his body seems to ache in anticipation.

 

But something snags his skull, and coaxes him to turn back around, and take in a breath of salty air, and watch the rocks below. He draws it in, that cloy and pointless motion, and lets the air spread out from his lungs in a thin exhale. It tapers down to a hiss when he sees it in the sand. 

The strange coaxing in his head makes flawless sense, looking down from the peak. From the heightened angle, he can see a corpse, positioned where the rocks bleed into sand, just above the reach of the water. 

It lies a few meters from where he hid his own body for the daylight hours. The neck is twisted cleanly around, arms and legs caught rigid at awful angles. Somehow, the daze of sudden consciousness, and the path he took up the trail kept it from him, and a gnawing pain picks up in his stomach, numb and spiking with not knowing when or how it was deposited there. 

There’s a chill, then. Not just in the air around him, but inhabiting the hollows of his eyelids, and creases of his palms. Suddenly he finds he can’t get into the city fast enough, and forces his body into a run, summoning the little energy he can find. 

It’s graceless, but it gets him there. 

↶↶↶

 

The maze of streets all seem to be lined with newspapers. The gutters and potholes and nooks and crannies stuffed full, like insulation, and the pavement all littered with glass. Louis walks as hurriedly as the fatigue in his legs lets him. He makes sharp turns and darts down streets without any other intention but to get away from where he emerged, feeling with every step that if he were to look over his shoulder, he’d see something there. 

A broken-limbed corpse, perhaps, leaving wet footprints on the ground, smelling bloodless and bad. 

 

The paranoia only grows as he winds himself through the city streets. The sound of cars passing over further off streets whirls a strange feeling through his chest - an unseen flush, a panicked sear of want. The distant noises that promise life strangle themselves on the neurosis chewing through his skull. 

He finds himself scared, and a little grateful the feeling is one his altered mind can still access. Scared of turning a corner, or peering into a blackened alley, and finding something peering back at him. Cats and corpses. Monstrosities with eyes like the patterns of moth wings, unblinking and drinking him up. 

 

And yet, through the fear, another monster rears its head and sinks mangy teeth into his mind.

_Feed me, feed me!_

The inner linings of Louis’ head are shrieking like winter gales, insane and insistent, and the inner linings of his stomach are shredding and consuming themselves. 

_Starving, starving, feed me.._

It’s structure is everything that should read as pathetic, needy and easily ignorable, but there’s a strength to the notes, hitting just behind his eyes, demanding to be heard, warbling in some evil tenor, a screaming vibrato through his veins. 

 

It’s black and pure luck that he sees the small and broken body when the screaming in his head seems to have reached its peak, the bloody crescendo. A further, colder part inside his chest seems to feel that it wasn’t luck at all, but some morbid, cruel plan, but the high pitched demands pay it no heed. 

_Flesh, food, feed me! FEED ME!_

And even as Louis wills himself to refuse, to take a stand with this tiny core of self amid the din, his strength is flagging fast, and there’s little else inside to muster up any aid.

 

Another cat. It’s no longer trying to breathe, and a gross and shouting part of Louis’ head has the gall to feel disappointed, having missed out on sucking the life from its lungs. A single, wicked slash runs across the animal’s throat. The insides are trying to get out, and the words pressing against the backs of Louis’ eyes are more than willing to aid them in their escape.

 

_FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME! STARVING! STARVING! FEED ME!_

 

He’s weak, and breathing in the smell of blood. 

 

He can see it happening, as if his eyes and mind have detached from each other, as if his actions are tightly wound and rolling on a projector. 

He watches his knees bend and buckle, the asphalt hooking into the fabric at his knees and holding on, so tenderly. 

He sees his hands, wan and small and so nearly shapeless as his eyes water. Hands reaching out and catching hold of stone-cold fur, fingers slipping into the tatters, caressing so delicately and fervently. 

 

There’s a moment where the hunger seems to dissipate, one brief hiccup in time where the only thing he’s feeling is gratefulness. Grateful that he can’t see the expression he feels unfurling across his face, or the lackluster glint in his eyes before they blink closed, and he bites in. 

Then all grateful and graceful feelings scatter, tendons screaming as they sprint away from the gruesome creature crouched and feeding in the dark. 

 

His teeth - the teeth that belong to the finally sated voice in his head - sink into the slash and the first spoils of clotted blood explode across his tongue.

 

It’s a swift and clapping orgasm from the roots of his teeth up into his brain stem, then running down his spine like dirty water and broken china. 

He finally stands, disgusted with the stains on his hands and the comfortable feeling of heat filling his abdomen. 

 

He wonders as his stomach purrs and head wretches, if he’s received anything from the dead animal. Gathered a set of skills, or nine more lives to tack onto the strange second wind he’s been given. If he has, he feels entirely ungrateful for both sets of gifts. 

 

A bloody gurgle trails down his insides as the monster in his head settles, and clawed hands go lax on the reins. Whatever humanity he’s still clinging to remains, and his first instinct is to scream, raw and coated with guilt like mange. 

It’s something he finds he has to inhale to do, and the action burns through his sinuses like a gasp of chlorine.

↶↶↶

 

He doesn’t feel feline as he finds his feet pointed towards the same path as the night before. There’s a taste on his tongue beneath the stale blood - iodine and salted air. He licks his lips and the flavour vanishes, back into his mind where it was conjured from. It curls up with the once-screaming voice, now sleeping, fat and satisfied. 

 

He finds he’s still craving something, once the liquid settles in his stomach like a cold punch. He tries, fleetingly, to call up some memory to make sense of the feeling. 

It’s a simple want, mortal and soft. A plain desire for something warm and breathing to be there next to him, companionship in the dark, caught up in his own evil actions. 

He finds can’t conjure up a face or figure from his lost life, just shadowed shapes, ideas of people. The clearest is foggy and greying; that woman’s voice, sad and speaking his name to an empty room. A mother, or lover, someone from a lifetime ago. She offers no comfort now, in the stained night, dead animals haunting his steps, his insides gone all grey. It’s a childlike want, twisting all around his nerves, for a body to be there beside him, not lying broken on the streets.

First, without explanation, he thinks of the strange presence in the trees behind the cemetery. Black and cruel company, the cold feeling of being watched. A dead and calculating companion, a shadow cast from streetlights and fear. It’s not the thing he wants beside him, though he can feel it, the night breathing foul breath all around him. 

Then, he thinks of the man, twisting red plastic, and then a roll of gauze in his long fingers. The tiny makeshift home, so temporary placed on the city’s outskirts. The image quickly becomes all he needs.

The cat’s blood sits chilling in his abdomen, and he walks towards the projection of the man inside his mind. It strikes up a weird song beneath his tongue. The strange powerless rush of being so close to something he wants so badly, without the threat of needing it. 

He tries to tell himself that his cravings lie within very human territories - company, conversation. 

But his feet move onwards, driven by the underlying promise of blood. 

 

↶↶↶

 

The man is there, all sallow beneath the lamp, just as Louis knew he would be. It’s much too early in the night for any natural patterned man to be up normally, and Louis knows he’s being waited for.

The cold and newly-fed, dead part of him uncurls and smiles at the sight. 

_Yes, you. Just where I’ve left you._ It's his own voice now, strengthened and overpowering the banshee shriek in his head. 

 

The shadows are stretching him out, making him taller than he seems. He’s stretching too, arms reaching up over his head, pulling down the edges of a tarp over the far corner of the trailer roof. He looks unnaturally long and thin in the yellow glow, surrounded by the tapering night, and Louis balks at a distance, watching. 

He can’t look away from the flesh of his naval, stretched out and straining. A wire-thin line of exposed skin, and Louis thinks the cold air must be feeding on it. His thoughts disease and scatter, imagining the fluid press of organs tightly wound together, hot and close, and he wants to be the same. 

The tarp finally settles, and the man sags back down to his normal height, a little hunched, back aching, perhaps. From the shadows, Louis stands watching him, all long coat and short nails, feeling a red sort of heat creeping through his sternum, a hot coil, an urge to jump. 

 

There’s a bottle in one hand, clear plastic, and it must be water, because the only scent being carried to him on the wind is of flesh and soft sweat. 

Much less pink than he seemed before, and standing out in darker and deeper hues.

Louis stands, watching him drink, his throat moving slightly. The man - Harry - dips his hand into his pocket, pulling out a white handkerchief, raising it to his chin. He draws it over his mouth, red cuticles, red lips, all of him red.

And Louis watches him, a lace tease of crimson, and chews down on his own tongue to veil the bellyache growing inside of him. 

 

Louis stirs in the shadows, revealing himself in a dark flutter of movement. The man doesn’t waste time acting surprised to see him there, but instead stands rather willing, and he’s still as Louis comes towards him.

 

“Hello,” he says in greeting, and the word sounds slow and out of breath, despite the stillness. “Again,” he adds and Louis takes a step closer to the lamplight. 

 

“What are you doing out here?” Louis asks. It’s shaped like a hello, too, whittled down by sharp canines and bloodlust. That demon voice inside his skull finds him again, and twists his words behind his teeth. _What’s a pretty thing like you doing in a place like this?_ He refuses to say it, and shivers instead. 

“A carnival comes, in the summers. Tourists,” the man says, and Louis understands his faded posture better. A butterfly nearing the end of its season, awaiting a long rest. 

 

“Yesterday,” Louis says. It already feels a lifetime away. “Thank you for helping me.” He wants to ask why. He doesn’t understand, or really care to, but finds himself simply starved for the sound of the man’s voice, eyes stuck on the tremble of his throat as he does. 

“You could still use some help,” the man replies. “That doesn’t look good.” There’s a following gesture to the disease of Louis’ arm, but he imagines it applied to the entirety of his upright corpse. There’s a smell. Louis knows it’s him, and imagines that he’s atrophied somewhere between being dead and feeling sleepless.

 

The man comes forward, away from the light and into the blackness where Louis is standing. He picks up Louis’ wrist, and the blood in Louis’ stomach sings at the contact. Warmth, a pleased hiss, like something bubbling over and catching on the burner.

“Please - ” the man says, and the earthiness in his tone is suddenly sharp and stinging. It catches Louis’ shoulders, and as he stands he tries to will himself to leave, wondering if he has the strength to do so. 

He finds himself unable to. The grip on his wrist is paper-light and begging to be torn, but he finds himself immobile, caught in the web spun out from green eyes. 

“I’m sorry.” The tone has deflated. “You can go. You must have someone looking for you.” The man’s face has fallen strangely, and his arm does too, releasing Louis’ wrist and hanging limply by his side. It must paint a strange picture, Louis thinks. For a pale and bloodied apparition to keep returning to the man’s door, eager and odd, only to seem itching to run off again. 

The thought of someone looking for him racks up spinning thoughts in Louis’ head. The echoed memory of that woman’s voice, and the shadowed feeling of someone watching from the shoreline. 

He wants to dive in, or run off into the night, wants some kind of action to fold itself out before him, now fuelled on dirty, stolen energy. 

“May I come in,” is what he says, and a cautious light enters the man’s face as he nods, still waking slowly, and guides him towards the trailer’s door. 

 

↶↶↶


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

“You’ve never asked for my name,” Louis says into the stillness of the small space. Harry regards him carefully for a moment, then folds his hands in his lap. He’s seated on the edge of the neatly made up cot that takes up half the trailer. Louis is standing, flitting between the door and the fabric fold out chair presented for him.

“Your name is Louis. Or, like the french? Lou- _ie?_ Yes, that’s the one.” Louis looks at him, matching the stillness now, watching his expression shift, a little sad. 

“Yes,” Louis echoes after a pause. He can feel the skin of his neck tightening, sharply thrown, the advantage taken from him. 

 

“You were in the paper,” Harry says. “Last week.” It makes no sense to Louis, and the man continues, watching him with bleakly green eyes. “Dug through the old copies after your visit. I knew I had seen you before.” Even the chaos in Louis’ head and mouth has gone silent, though it stirs as the man stands and his hands disappear into a milk crate beside the cot. They’re out again a moment later, a folded newspaper held gently in his fingers. 

Louis takes it when it’s held out to him, careful not to touch their fingers together and feed the flame. Looking down at the page, he sees his own face stamped on a column like a past reflection. 

Even in black and white Louis can recognize life in his face, surely amber in person, and a brightness in his eyes and mouth that isn’t there now. He can see the words forming, and he accepts the chair to keep his knees from shaking so visibly.

The headline grips him with a frightful sorrow but no surprise:

_Drowning Tragedy,_ then underneath; _undertow claims local man’s life._ A short paragraph of the retrieval of the body - a body sitting numb, eyes grey lit and scanning the article. An ending line stating service details. 

“I thought so when I saw you,” the man says. It interrupts the crushing grief leaking like ink from the paper into Louis’ fingertips. “Thought I’d never seen a man so silver. That if I hadn’t known better I’d think you’d have passed over. But surely, that’s impossible.” His eyes don’t implore that he doesn’t know better now. In fact they seem to catch and shine with wisdom blacker and bleaker than the colour they hold.

Louis’ head is spinning, ceramic horses turning on a pedestal, carousel tongs like butterfly wings. His brain is pale and runny, clogged with thoughts of newspapers stuffed in storm drains and patterning the curb sides, mocking his death, unseen but reminding him of the heart stilled inside his chest. 

Spinning, spinning, and catching on the strange words from the strange man sitting across from him in the tiny space. Not understanding his talk of being silver, but feeling silver, so silver beneath the yellow light coming down from the solitary bulb. 

“I don’t know what that means.” He finally says. He doesn’t feel cold, but there’s a chilled flavour there in his tone, and it stains his teeth like old coffee. Clippings from older newspapers sparsely decorate the walls of the trailer. Some yellowed with time, pictures of children and families holding balloons, playing beneath a long set summer sun, rides and cotton candy all captured in squared articles.

“I treated your wound. Your wrists - ” Harry’s fingers twitch then still, and Louis draws his arms in closer to his body. “There was no pulse, but there you were - ” 

“Silver,” Louis interrupts, and the man’s face changes subtly. His posture seems to sway, and the intensity burning in his eyes lessens. 

“Silver,” the man repeats, and his tone is silver to match. “Your aura, sir, your - ” he raises a hand to wring it through the air, a wavering gesture. “These colours I see. Like a ring around the self of people. Healthy colours, or greyer rings. And yours, just silver.”

Louis is silent, watching as Harry stops speaking, hands returning helpless to his lap. 

“I know how it sounds,” Harry says quietly. “But then, you must understand how difficult some things are to explain.” It’s a soft challenge that rests gently in the air between them. Louis wants to bite through it, but instead says nothing. He watches Harry squirm through the silence instead, wan and worn but bursting with questions, and it isn’t long before another spills past pink lips. 

 

“Are there many?” Harry asks, and Louis feels a tugging around his ankles, as if he’s been caught in a snare. Something inside is urging him to flee from the man, and keep his tongue silent. But he’s tired, and sick of falling weak to urges, at least for one night.

“And - is it other things as well? Others things we thought were just stories.” Louis shifts in his chair - a body length shrug.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “I don’t know anything about it. I just found myself like this, however many days ago.” It’s a strained admission, but Harry seems to let it slide simply. Everything he does, simple and accepting, seemingly without the will or want to argue, or bargain anymore. 

“I wonder so much. How did it happen?” Harry asks. There’s a toxic curiosity in his voice, and Louis feels starved for it. 

“I don’t know,” Louis answers helplessly. Helpless in not knowing, helpless in answering. “There was a stretch of nothingness. I don’t know how long it lasted. Then I was awake.” He doesn’t mention the strange shadowed presence he could and can still feel, prodding inside him.

“Awake?” The man asks, a well trimmed interruption. “Not alive?” Louis hesitates. He watches the flow of life in the man’s eyes, living flesh and brightness, albeit darkened by something running him down. 

“Awake,” Louis repeats. His stomach twists and he thinks he ought to be feeling sadness, and perhaps he is, through the hunger, creeping towards him through the dark once again. It seems the cat held no lasting stamina in its corpse.

“And then...” Harry is prompting him again, the slow coax of a feral dog. Cats and dogs, and a downpour is kicking up in the back of Louis’ head.

“And then I was naked and buried in shallow dirt,” Louis says, fighting through the storm. There’s no finesse, no glory, and Harry is blessedly silent. “I crawled out, and saw where I was. There was a grave marker with my name on it, and red roses at the foot of it.” Across from him in the small room, Harry seems to be eating his grief, and sharing the taste. 

“There were clothes too, and I put them on. I play it over, again and again, and it never makes any more sense.” Harry sighs deeply, and takes a breath, not quite so deeply. Louis can hear something rattling in his chest.

“Shallow dirt,” Harry says once the breath has returned to his lungs. “Why weren’t you buried in a casket?” 

“I’m sure I was,” Louis says. The bitterness of the words cling to his teeth, burrowing in to create violent cavities in the damp dark. A pang ripples out from within his abdomen, and he nearly doubles over, folding up in the fabric chair, and the man lurches forward, startled.

“Sir, are you alright?” he’s asking, and the claws uncurling in Louis’ guts feel unworthy of the title. 

“I have to go - ” Louis says, standing, still bent, and the man is swift to follow, standing a little stiffer, stance a bit more laboured once he makes it up. 

“What’s wrong?” he asks, and in the yellow light Louis imagines pressing their bodies together and biting into the column of his neck, suckling out the crackled breathing. 

“I shouldn’t be in here, speaking with you,” Louis says, and his hands are scratching the walls of the trailer, searching for the door handle, desperate for the night.

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” Harry is insisting, while helping Louis to the door. His fingers deftly catch the handle, and twist.

“I will,” Louis says, a pained hiss as he stumbles out into the dark, and feels the press of cool air against his face. It doesn’t help. In fact the freshness of it sharpens the black coiling inside him, and the warm press of Harry’s hand against his shoulder worsens the pain. 

“Is it - ” Harry stops himself, and lowers his hand. He doesn’t back away, and Louis can’t understand it. “Are you hungry?” That burning deep curiosity is back in the man’s tone, and Louis doesn’t like it. Rather, doesn’t like how simple it would be to just pivot, step forward and feed. 

Harry stands very still as he does pivot, and he’s grateful, suddenly sure if the man were to bolt or falter in his stance, he wouldn’t have the will to stop himself from pouncing. 

“If I stay here I’ll hurt you,” Louis finally says. His throat feels tight and his voice comes out strangled. The man doesn’t balk, instead, stepping impossibly closer, and returning his palm to Louis’ shoulder. 

“Can I help? If there’s something I could do to help...” Louis hisses as his stomach contracts, feeling the pressure in the roof of his mouth explode, pointed teeth coming out in a pink spray of blood that he swallows greedily, along with his discarded human canines. 

“I’m a killer, I don’t want to be,” Louis says, the air rushing cold between his teeth and tongue. 

“You don’t feel like a killer to me,” Harry says, after a few dark breaths of the night around them. Louis wants to gasp and cry at the spilled words, but his eyes feel too deep for tears, and his tear ducts seem to be sealed closed. 

“You’re wrong,” Louis whispers back. His body is giving in to the warmth, and he’s inching closer, unwilling, and unable to pull back into the black solitude. 

“Look at your hands,” Harry says. It’s a soft insisting. 

Louis looks, expecting to see something more than the pale and still curve of his fingers. Clawed and pointed nails, perhaps. Or the stain of blood, clotted and accusatory, dripping across lifelines, contradictory and cold. 

“My hands..” Louis says, mind rushing with the electric heat of Harry’s body so close to his own. Inside there are sparks and biting heat, stars under his skin and behind his eyes, muscles cramping and twisting and burning around his bones.

“This was the life you led,” Harry says, and his tongue twists the words into a fervent whisper. “A poet, perhaps.” But Louis doesn’t feel like a poet. His skull feels tight and filthy, thick with flies. 

“It’s not what I’m leading now,” Louis says, the words seem to grate through his throat, tearing themselves into pieces that settle like dust onto the ground. He’s hesitant to call his state anything at all, much less a ‘life,’ something with purpose and breath. “I just want to understand why.” 

“Why you’ve come back?” Harry asks. His hands are quiet, still amber-tinted and finely crafted, one still pressed gently to the fabric of Louis’ coat.

“Yes,” Louis says, his head falling down an increment in agreement, then hanging low, despair wedging a mottled grey hand around his nape, and holding him there. The angle refuses to let him stare at Harry’s skin, his neck inviting, powerless and godly in the night. “And why I’ve come back as something so dark.” 

“I’m sorry I don’t have any answers,” Harry says. His voice has fallen low and intimate too, still entirely without fear, and Louis’ salivating. “But I’d like to help you find them.” Louis head tips up as the man swallows, waiting for a reply. Instead, he’s met with grey eyes, a little sunken by the hour, pupils black and nearly eclipsing. 

“I’d like to help in any way I can,” Harry says, still insisting, so gently and untouched by terror. 

Louis’ eyes cave, and they blink, and lick all over his neck, pink and amber and alive, the scent rolling off the man so vibrant and hot, so close to irresistible that Louis hates it, or rather, the monster in his chest hates it, disgusted by the thought of such easy prey. The barely conscious, almost human part of Louis’ brain hates it, but latches on, grateful for any kind of resistance keeping him from bloodshed for a moment longer. 

“I’ll come back,” Louis whispers. Words work, giving him something to do with his mouth, less destructive, and he’s almost unnerved with how put out the man looks before him. 

“Let me come with you,” he’s saying, even as Louis is turning away, tossing the hand from his shoulder and facing the night. “Please, it’s not safe out there.” Louis agrees, but doesn’t reply, breaking into the fastest pace he can manage, still a little crazed and drunk off dead blood.

Harry doesn’t follow him into the night. That evil, observing bit in Louis’ head predicted as much, pushing himself on, trusting the man to stay, unable to keep up. Something wrong with his lungs, and he thinks briefly of wolves, picking off the old and the sick before shaking it out of his head, and running to the city in the shadows. 

 

↶↶↶

 

All he finds are old and sick. 

The whole section of mazed streets feel stale to him, and he stalks through the alleys, traces of winos and junkies, the scents sticking to the inside of his mouth like cheap glue. The smells and distant sounds of cars passing far away infuriate the gnashing voice in his ears, but he refuses to cut in deeper to the heart of the city. 

Finally, scavenging, he finds a man, his body plastered in newspapers. 

Louis notes, a little manically, that some of the papers are sickly familiar. _Drowning Tragedy,_ and he tries to drown himself on beer-soaked blood to block them out. 

The man doesn’t struggle - barely moves at all - and the sickness in Louis’ head finds no joy in draining him. 

The taste and the sway of his head when he’s finished reminds him of being alive, but there’s no slur waiting on his tongue, no stumble to his legs. Instead he feels rich with energy, heat and vigour bubbling down to his toes, and the night feels fresh and hot. Alive with a terrible delight. 

 

It’s a high that narrates his journey back to the outskirts, road flying beneath his feet. 

The trailer is lit alive in an amber glow, and when he knocks, pauses, steps inside, he finds the man is too. 

 

There is a moment, a swirling instance that lives in the darkness below Harry’s eyes, and the storm brewing in Louis’ solar plexus. In it, and only for a heartbeat, Louis can see a rippling outline around the man. A bright and shining colour, flitting between gold and grey. Then he blinks and it’s gone from his sight. 

“How are you?” Harry asks, and Louis watches his mouth form the words. Details are easy to spot now, and come out at him with an almost violent potency. The rough curve of Harry’s jaw, and the dip of his chin as he speaks. Louis finds he’s unable to grasp, even blindly, at how much time has passed. He picks out a pinkness around the man’s eyes that wasn’t there before, and decides he must have been sleeping, and wants to know what his dreamed were made of. He wants to answer, say _I’m fine,_ but it feels like such a human thing to say. 

“How long was I gone?” He asks instead, and the man shifts, pushing his sleeve up partway. 

“A few hours,” he replies. “I’d hoped you’d be back.” Louis bites down on his own tongue and doesn’t ask why.

 

There’s a silence, then. And in it a winding road of promise that hasn’t lived in their conversations before. Louis pinpoints it as the time of the night, having still just begun rather than dying out. There’s a pressure now, of words and company, instead of the terror brewing and forcing him to run and hide the day away. He lets this new pressure stir as Harry speaks again. 

“Have you encountered anyone else?” The words fester into Louis, and his shoulders dip. 

“I haven’t spoken to anyone else,” he replies, carefully and shamefully. He finds himself looking at his hands again, and finding no poetry. An upwards glance shows Harry looking at him too. 

Again, that sorrowful, sweet smile.

A silence falls and he wants to scream. More than that, he wants to speak about his strange paranoia, living in the treelines and the edges of the cliffs. The unseen figure he’s felt haunting him is suddenly about to from emerge past his lips. Somehow he refrains.

Finally, Harry speaks, and Louis feels as if his rampant thoughts have infected the man. 

“So, who left the flowers?” 

“Flowers,” Louis parrots, a little wildly. His eyes run over the cot, a made-for-one mattress, and the worn brown colour of the coat Harry is still wearing, tucked away indoors. It takes his mind a moment to tear away from the flesh of Harry’s hands and fingers, resting gently in his lap, long and inviting.

“Maybe something leftover from the service,” he finally says, and watching, he sees his offered answer catch on Harry’s face. He looks unsatisfied. 

“Roses aren’t something left by mourners,” Harry says, and the low walk of his voice is a rolling storm through Louis’ chest. “And grief isn’t red. Have you - ” he cuts himself off as Louis turns to the wall of paper clippings. 

Louis stays silent, eyes feeling porous as he drinks in the faded images and lettering, his head rolling like wheels on a track, replaying his awakening, with dirt and fear and roses and pressed clothing.

“Have you considered that they may have been from whoever it was that visited you last?” 

“The one that dug me up,” Louis says, and his tongue feels like lead, a grim and dead thing in his mouth.

“Perhaps they were a gift,” Harry says, his voice matching the deadliness in Louis’ with gentleness. 

“As if it was a gift, to wake up like this,” Louis says, and his voice is a hiss, all lit by a sudden and quiet fury. The blood boiling its way through his stomach feels like fuel, battery acid. 

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, and from his tone Louis can tell that he is, truly sorry, and it makes the blood sting as his insides, a frothing brew of anger and spite. But it’s not spite for the man sitting in front of him, and he tries to soothe the burn. 

“Someone came into my grave.” He speaks slowly, his tongue chasing the smooth, easiness of the burn coiling through his throat. “Someone came into my grave, and took me from my coffin. They stole my death.” His eyes are fierce when they find Harry’s, green and sorrowful. 

“I was supposed to be at rest. _Peace,”_ he spits the word out, and it drips from his teeth, stringy and spent. 

“I am so sorry,” Harry says, and it’s a vapour-chased whisper into the night. Something in his tone, some ancient mourning extends fingers towards Louis, and catches hold of him, tight beneath the chin. It feels genuine and wrong, for a man to simply understand, empathize to a stained and battered monster. Twisted, very strange, but Louis lets himself be comforted by the gesture. The gratitude he feels stirring through his veins feels stranger still. 

“Do you think they’re still here with you?” Harry asks. 

There is one wild moment when Louis wonders if he’s being played by the man in front of him. That the kindness and laboured breathing have simply been guises, and he’s been the presence waiting at the treelines the whole time. It doesn’t fit, and he lets the terror grip him then pass into the darkness. 

“I don’t know where,” he says, defeat gripping tight to his words and dragging them down. “Though I’m sure it knows where I am.” He catches sight of it then, a shadow of fear that flashes across Harry’s face. He wants to cut it from his skin, but instead finds himself taking a step closer. Harry shifts on the cot, then, impossibly, gestures for Louis to sit beside him. Impossibly still, Louis does. 

 

They coax words out of him then; the quiet presence at his side, and the feverish high laughing up his spine and into his fingertips. He speaks of the cats, of the newspapers stained with his face, lining the streets he walked down, and of the corpse on the beach. His own paranoia and self, so unsure of their interpretation. Are they offerings or threats? He rambles for what feels like days, stuffed fill with energy and so many questions. 

Harry finally speaks, asking if he’s cold, and it snaps him from his livid trance, to look wide-eyed at the man beside him.

“You’re shaking,” Harry says, voice low and eyes fixed on Louis’ hands. They are trembling, pressed tight between his knees to stop the shake.   “No,” he answers. “I don’t think I can get cold anymore.” Harry reaches out with narrow, cautious deer-like movements, and places a hand atop Louis’. The warmth is immediate, spilling out from Harry’s palm to radiate through Louis’ fingers. 

“God, you’re like ice,” Harry says, marvelling, and makes no move to remove his hand, Louis playing statue beneath the contact. They stay like that a moment, Harry breathing and Louis listening. The rattling is still there in Harry’s lungs, now sounding like a thousand tiny pieces of cellophane paper. 

Apart from the rattle there’s silence. And a whole vigil of emotions and sensations that haven’t been present before in Louis’ grey and starved state. He hates how much he’s swimming in it, overwhelmed and gorging himself on the feelings, seasick with a red and boiling affinity for the man beside him.

“What time is it?” Louis asks. The words take the place of the trembling gnash of teeth inside his mouth. 

“We have a few hours before dawn.” Harry replies. His position shifts, and Louis can hear a creaking come from inside his spine, a light twist, a wild snap, that rouses thoughts of screen doors in summer storms. 

“Okay,” Louis says. His eyes snag on the movement of Harry’s hands. It slides from being clasped atop Louis’ own fingers, and retreats back to Harry’s lap. Looking down at himself, he sees a peculiar swatch of colour. A golden-tinted flush, spreading just barely beneath the surface of his skin - the imprint of the man’s palm, and stolen blood rising to the surface. Lured like small fishes. 

“What happens at dawn?” Harry asks. His eyes are locked on Louis’ hands too. “You run off, you seem so frightened. I can’t imagine what there is left to be frightened of.” 

“I lose consciousness,” Louis says, and it feels cheap, a dulled down and fickle explanation. “And the sunlight...”

“I almost can’t believe how quickly that’s healed,” Harry says. Louis’ eyes flick up to wash over his face, and they slip into the grooves. The press beneath green eyes, and how the skin goes faint and purple. Exhaustion tosses a waver into the fascination in his voice. Louis follows Harry’s gaze down. The exposed skin just beneath his shirt sleeve is clean again, porcelain and unburnt - passably untouched. Running a fingertip across the skin, Louis remembers the way it looked, raw and mangled, and infected shades of pink and grey. 

“Can’t believe a lot of things,” Harry says, a little softer. The sound is back - in Harry’s lungs and Louis’ ears. Strained capillaries, like distant static. “What does it feel like?” Something in Harry’s voice sounds distant and strained too. A little desperate, a little demanding, and searching for something. 

“Feel like..?” Louis echoes, blinking at the question and at the fevered light coming at him from Harry’s eyes.

“The end...do you remember how it felt? And waking up, waking up new.” A fire has started burning in Harry’s eyes, a cracked lantern bleeding oil and feeding the flame.

“Dying felt like nothing,” Louis says. There’s a patchwork of blue and hazy memories strung up like a dreamcatcher in his head, and he speaks slowly. “I can barely remember living, but dying is barely there.” 

“And waking up?” Harry asks, pressing with his words, and falling into a slouched lean, eager and earnest. Louis can see it in the dip of his shoulders that it’s getting harder for him to hold himself upright, eyes a little bloodshot, and the colour isn’t lost on the quieted but still-there voice in Louis’ skull. 

“Weightless...and terrible,” Louis says. The muscles in his stomach pull tight as the man looks at him, and into him with unsinking eyes, sleepless and fixed. “Like seawater,” he adds. The sensation of a smile moving onto his lips is almost unrecognizable. “It feels like the sea feels.”

“That must feel powerful,” 

“It should,” Louis says. His tone has matched Harry’s, hot and low like liquid embers in the small space. 

“Doesn’t it?” Harry asks, and that soft desperation is back, clawing out towards Louis, tiny hooked hands digging in and pleading, wanting to believe in something, and crawl into it.

“No,” Louis says, and it’s more of a hungered sigh than a word with any meaning. Harry’s hands come forward then too, not hooked or digging, but smooth and careful, like ships treading into black waters. They reclaim their position atop Louis’ fingers. “It feels like I don’t have any control at all.” Harry’s eyes change, a fraction, mere millimetres of pupils swelling, black taking over the tired greens. 

“Please,” Louis whispers, his teeth parting his lips with the word, a bloody hiss, craven, craving, and Harry feels all at once too close. “Don’t touch me,” he finishes, and Harry flinches, blinking the spell away, and retreating, hands now more like rats fleeing a sinking ship than the craft herself. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, a tangled mutter that stumbles its way around the room. Louis imagines it finds a corner to die in. 

“It’s not that - ” he says, watching with a small ache the way Harry’s hands wring themselves together, winding like a nest of snakes, shamed. “I don’t want to hurt you.” _But I do…_ the same bleak creature winds its way behind Louis’ eyes, and tempts his tongue to shape the words, but he bites it away, severing the urge, still sated. “I don’t want to want to.”

 

“You could stay. For a while, if you like,” Harry finally says, and it’s an offer as heady and cruel as the onslaught of dawn. “You could rest,” Harry adds when Louis answers with silence. 

“I could hurt you,” Louis repeats, and it’s not a threat, but a sprig of tired terror. It’s not paired with an exit. Instead, he stays seated, eyes burning holes into Harry’s. There are white circles pressed into his eyelids when he blinks, a captured kiss of Harry’s pupils, branded onto him. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s alright,” Harry says, and Louis doesn’t understand how simple he’s making it seem. 

“I could kill you,” Louis says. His voice is lagging, losing backbone, imagining the stiff press of a mattress, and the quiet in his mind, a sleeping body behind a locked door, and someone there besides his own terror when he wakes. 

“That’s alright too,” Harry says, and suddenly they’re not sitting and talking anymore. 

Louis rears up from the edge of his seat and comes fast and forwards to Harry. The monster dwelling in his chest is burning white-hot, furious at the lack of fear, the undaunted look in the man’s eyes, burning like trees, pupils like charcoal and ash just drinking him in, unafraid. 

Louis’ hands dive in, spreading themselves across the man’s flesh, one wrapped in a death grip around Harry’s wrist, the other locking in a breathless embrace around his throat. Harry makes a sound - a gasp, but it’s nothing close to fear at all. Chewing its way closer and closer to the surface, the monster roars out its displeasure. 

The back of Harry’s chair hits the wall, and the photographs and newspaper clippings shudder. One catches Louis’ eye, even as he pins the man to the chair, hands squeezing, overwhelmed by the heat of flesh. 

_\- undertow claims local -_

And he forces his eyes back down. Harry is waiting, staring, lips parted, eyes wide and quiet, even as they burn. 

“You could,” he whispers, windpipe so reduced, and the words are a religious and suffocated roll. “You could kill me.” 

The way he’s speaking is low and full of light, as if he’s in prayer, and it feeds the trouble brewing in Louis’ head and hands, fisting tighter around Harry’s throat, and looser around his wrist. The sound crying out from Harry’s lungs is louder now, protesting. Tin foil and sweets packets and Styrofoam, all caught in a wave, and being slowly burnt. Gasoline floating to the surface.

“It’s alright,” Harry says, and Louis can feel the shape of his own face changing, a mask of rage and power, flexing muscle that betrays his frame, bending it out of shape, into something shadowed and monstrous. The grip on Harry’s wrist has gone so lax that Harry pulls it free, and moves it deftly upwards to catch hold of Louis’ waist. “I know you won’t.” 

_Just kill him._

The voice is unignorable in Louis’ head, screaming at full volume in his ears, but in a different pitch than before. Now the evil it’s always urged him towards is empty, without the promise of purpose, no pains or movements in his guts demanding to be fed. Instead the only urge begging to be quenched is violence. And Louis’ hands balk and tremble in defiance. 

_Just KILL HIM._

There’s a note of senseless anger to the voice now, and it trickles down his spine onto the floor, tepid and ankle-deep. 

“I know you don’t want to,” Harry says. The words are bleeding, crushed and helpless, still unabashed and unafraid even as the air reaching his heaving lungs is pinched tight. Both hands free, they bow and fold in his lap, complacent and suddenly there’s a close-to-human emotion tail-gaiting the monster in Louis’ head and hands. 

“I don’t want to,” Louis whispers, a fever prayer in the room, chair overturned and a trickle of breath still gasping out. Impossibly, Harry moves against the grip on his throat, a small, fussy gesture. 

“You’re hurting me,” he says, a barely audible whine that Louis feels against his palm more than he hears it. Even more impossibly, his grip goes lax, and hands move to steady the man’s shoulders, a breath stealing raggedly from his lungs into Harry’s. 

“I’m sorry,” Louis tries, feeling intwined with Harry’s mind all at once, with the same pressure and breathlessness snaking around his torso. 

“I’m not afraid of you,” Harry says, and the bruising white handprint around his neck begins to flush with blood and fade to pink. 

“I can’t understand that,” Louis says, and in his mouth his sharpened peak teeth feel like the enemy, invasive and cruel, and he wants to dig them out and turn his back on everything that isn’t soft and low. 

“That’s alright,” Harry says, and the sound in his lungs is now hands smoothing out clear plastic and tissue paper. “Just let it be.”

↶↶↶

 

Louis rights the chair, shaking as Harry takes his hand again, apologizing, and hating the wormy way it leaves his lips. The confines of the trailer’s walls feel much too tight, coffin-like, and claustrophobia mates with a sudden vigour for his strange new half-life. The hybrid has him itching to the door again.

Standing in the doorway, the night air washes over him and leaks into the trailer. He can feel Harry shiver like vibrations through the air. Despite the chill in the air, he stands and joins Louis at the door. Harry’s eyes, surely blind in the darkness, search off into the night, seeking the horizon soon to be lit with morning grey clouds. 

At first it’s fear, etched in the corners of Harry’s eyes, an animal tremble as he peers from the edge of his den, watching for monsters moving in the night. Louis finds his body shifting, tipping closer to the man’s body, and dipping into the delight of warmth that spills from his chest - beating - into Louis’ shoulder.

There are no monsters to be seen outside, and Louis’ eyes instead fall on a swirl of dead leaves, racing each other and skipping on gravel. 

There’s now a look of longing, and the weight of the endless night infecting Harry’s face with lines and shadows. His eyes are cast to the left, just past the way Louis has been fleeing to the city, unseeing, but Louis imagines he’s seeing something clearly with his mind’s eye. 

Louis knows what’s off that way - the land eroding, the ancient pier - but past that, the other route, the trail dipping to the right, he can’t place the scenery, or the weird metal scent in the air. His face twists to a grimace as he fails to remember, scolding himself for not knowing the land he knew when he was living.

He turns into the direction Harry is facing, and breathes in, like a shark filtering water, second nature. All he gets is more of that distant, frustratingly familiar metal smell. It makes him think of trees blurring to grey and green, distance seen through glass. Snapshots of old memory, but it’s not enough to form a clear picture.

“What’s off that way?” Louis asks. Light is beginning to infiltrate the cloud cover, and Harry turns his head to follow Louis’ gaze.

“The pier,” Harry says. “The train yard, further on.” It clicks, dully in Louis’ head, an out of reach recollection of wheels and motion.

↶↶↶

They stand and stare at the fading black horizon and Harry speaks slowly, of places he’s gone, following those tracks, and years and years ago when boats would still pull up to the dock below the pier. Louis asks why they stopped coming, the trains and the boats and the crowds, and Harry’s answer - _the pier’s rundown, and maybe the sailors are too_ \- is almost too mortal to stand. 

Louis breathes instead, his lungs commanded and restless with the useless energy. That sharp, iron taste in the air suggests to him that no passengers have come through in years, perhaps longer than Harry has remembered. It has Louis thinking again of the carnival, and weary train cars pulling up and unfolding themselves on the chilled ground. 

The same chill in the air breaking against Harry’s skin finally has him ducking back inside the trailer, and Louis finds himself following, trailing the heat and the inexplicable serenity in Harry’s posture. Inside Louis’ head, the demon’s terrible thrashing has calmed too, bolted down and conquered for now. 

Dawn creeping close has a teetering flame sending fear into Louis’ bones, and when Harry asks if he’ll stay, and lie down, Louis can’t find the drive to run off. 

When consciousness flees on its own ragged feet, Louis’ eyes close, on some level still aware of the spread of gently breathing body weight flowering against his back.


	8. Chapter Eight

A sudden snap into a fast awakening, a light switch, an instance, a bulb sparking to life, and Louis finds himself conscious again. The dreamlessness of the spent day feels leaden around him, and it takes him a moment to realize Harry isn’t there with him. It’s a toiling surge of panic that happens next, his brain running in such a human way, but the monstrous voice crawling to him through the dark. 

It catches up, and stretches, complaining, a fanged grumble at the loss of stirring blood packaged so eagerly. The scent of stale pressed life lingers in the air around him, and it rouses Louis to shift upright, stand and pull at the gathered knots in his shoulders. The difference a flat fabric cot has made is evident all at once - his spine stretching and popping once, then springing back with a fresh weight to it. 

The solitary light bulb isn’t lit, and his eyes call shapes from the darkness, and guide him to the door - unlocked, and he steps out into the night air. 

 

Harry is seated in a foldout chair beside the trailer hitch. Balanced across his lap is a shotgun. He turns as Louis exits the trailer, and looks at him with exhaustion spread like infinity through his eyes. His hair lank and knotty, falling into his face, and he twists his mouth into a grimace like smile of greeting. The expression, the fatigue, has Louis’ guts cramping into a ball of slow-cooked terror. 

“What are you doing out here?” Louis asks. He’s dismally proud of the deep rooted feeling of concern that flares outwards. The outside air is damp and chilling, and Harry’s coat looks thinner than the skin around his cuticles, pink and bitten down. 

“I saw it,” Harry says, and his voice is a grainy croak from lack of sleep. “The vampire.” It’s the first time the word has been spoken aloud to Louis’ ears, and he hates the breathy feel of it. It’s fodder to the flames stirring up behind his skin, and the heat makes him shake. 

“Get inside,” Louis says, eyes instantly feeling larger with an uncontrolled mania, spreading like wildfire. 

“I want to be able to see it coming - ” Harry says, a strange strain of combative fire stapled to his words. 

“I don’t care, get inside,” Louis says, tacking on force and getting his way - the tired slouch of Harry’s shoulders carries no power. 

 

“What happened?” Louis asks as soon as he’s gotten the door shut and locked behind them. Harry slings the shotgun across his chest with such weary ease that Louis’ looking at him different, trying to decipher some new past from him that doesn’t quite align with twisting balloons for carnival-goers. 

“It’s wearing a very convincing human mask,” Harry says, teeth gritting and softness of his hands clenching to white around the handle of the gun. 

“Isn’t that what I’m doing,” Louis asks, a little deadpan but it’s not enough to hide the tremble in his gait. He’s itching to tear the gun from Harry’s grip, but suddenly unsure of his ability to conquer, watching the eerily natural way the weapon fits with Harry’s figure. 

“This thing had nothing human left to it,” Harry says, and when he turns to look Louis in the eye, the corners of his eyes are a ghastly red. “I’ve never seen something look so dead.” Some internal part of Louis boils with offense, but he pushes the lid down, stifling it.

“Did it hurt you,” Louis asks instead, already knowing that no, it presented itself then vanished back into the gloom. A purpose to instill fear, perhaps something else.

“It brought you something,” Harry says, shaking his head softly, as if attempting to banish something unsightly from his mind. His hands are empty save for the polished barrel of the gun, and Louis’ eyes narrow.

“What did it bring me,” he asks, voice chilled from the unsettling feel of not knowing what’s to come. 

“I didn’t want to touch it,” Harry says, his own voice dropping to a savage whisper, the edges of his demeanor chipped and peeling like old paint. 

 

Stepping back outside the trailer, it’s there, right in front of him, and Louis doesn’t understand how he could have missed it. The conspicuousness of it, and the smell. 

Pure black, absorbing the shades of the night, and tied with a deep red fabric ribbon, shoebox sized and placed with dreadful finesse on the gravel. A deep scent, heady and almost-sweet, like post ripened fruit spreads itself out across Louis’ palette, and a wet ripple of pleasure spreads down his back. It’s the scent of a fresh kill, and something else, something sharp and floral, and there’s not enough restraint to fight against the urge to step forward, and lift the lid.

“What is it?” Harry asks, a tremor in his voice like shifting plates, ready to crack and cave, and Louis jumps, berating himself at being so easily transfixed and not noticing the man follow him to the edge of the doorway. 

“A gift,” Louis says, voice slurred as he lisps around the protrusions in his mouth, fresh and jagged and shamelessly starved. _God, I don’t want it,_ he thinks, just as desperately, but still his body betrays him. He takes the box with ravenous hands, and Harry has the grace to look away. 

Inside is a heart, the congealing smell undoubtably human, and the inner lining of the box is black velvet, and scattered with blood red rose petals. He can feel Harry shrinking back inside the trailer, and as the door clicks shut, he’s grateful for the privacy.

Alone in the dark, the feeling of horrible eyes locked on him from the edges of the night, Louis shudders. His hands move on their own accord, and pull the sodden organ from its box. It has the texture of oiled rubber, and leaves streaks of pink across his palms. He finds no human excuse for the way his tongue rushes in to follow the wet trails on his fingers, and he sucks the stains into his mouth, greedy and unabashed for the time it takes to swallow.

The taste unfurls and writhes across his tongue, peaked so closely towards arousal that he shrinks inwards on himself, body wracked with a cruel, cruel poem. 

A notion floats into his head, then. An intrusive urge to bite into the organ, and feel the fluid chewiness of the meat, imagining how it would stick to his molars, almost-warm and tacking up around his gums. 

He’s close to following through on it - a heartbeat away, perhaps, when a sound from inside the trailer snaps him back into the moment. A muffled click, the sound of the safety being taken off the shotgun in Harry’s hands, and it’s a cold slap in the face that spurs Louis to drop the present back into the box. It misses, hits the edge and falls to the ground. There’s a grotesque, gritty squish as it rolls to a stop in the dirt. A sliver of humanity takes over Louis’ gaze at the sight, and deems it spoiled; unappetizing. He’s thankful, his head tips back to the sky, and he screams.

It’s an expulsion of violent rage, of pent up sickness and he howls himself hoarse, throat raw as he tries to block out the pounding in his ears - the sound of a terrified still-beating human heart waiting with a gun behind a closed door. 

Breathless, lifeless, the scream finally dies, ringing in his ears as he stares at the thing in the dirt at his feet, the edges of it neatly sliced and diced, near surgical in its perfection, and he wonders if it was cut from someone before they were even dead.

A sound filters out towards him when he’s finally silent, almost like a silken echo. A greasy laugh, a bloodied chuckle, and it has him turning on his heels and clawing the trailer door open, the feeling of some devil hot on his heels. 

He fights off a human and infantile urge to crawl beneath the covers and burrow his head, and crashes into Harry instead. There’s comfort to be drawn from the crashing together of their bodies, and he holds on, still so desperate, and Harry recoils, adjusts the gun he’s holding, and still managed to grab him back, startled and shocked, white knuckled and gasping. 

“It’s still out there,” Louis breathes, inhaling through his mouth. It draws in the lavish scent of Harry’s skin, unwashed and sweating, and a rolling lurch of ecstasy punches a hole in his stomach. 

“What does it want,” Harry asks, and his breath comes out ragged, making the side of Louis’ cheek damp with condensation, and he imagines it fogging him up like glass, or some cold metal surface.

“I don’t know,” Louis says, pulling his head away from Harry, nearly retching from how close his throat is, so open, the vein pushed high to the surface in dear. The words feel like a lie, and his fingers are twisting, still imagining the streaking fluid he’s licked clean off the skin, and the plush silk of rose petals. 

“Come away from the door,” Harry says, dragging Louis further into the trailer, pushing him out of the way with his free arm. 

Harry stands between him and the door, legs spread and gun raised, and Louis sinks to the cot again, feeling like a coward, or some shaking ward kept inside from the dangers of the streets below.

 

Enough time passes that Harry’s shoulder develops a shake too, and finally Louis sighs and tries to strangle the tension from the air with words.

“It’s playing with us,” is what he comes up with, and it does nothing to distill the fear. 

“Did you see it?” Harry asks. Louis can see the bunching of muscles in his back, even through the fabric of his coat, and he stares at the even hold of the barrel, a blind eye fixed midway on the door. 

“No,” Louis says, cracking the pressure building in his jaw. “I heard it, I know it’s there.” Harry breathes out unevenly through his nose, a meditative gesture, but his body stays animated, all tension. “What does it look like?” Louis asks, and his brain starts conjuring up awful images; sunken features and greyscale flesh, black eyes and bloody mouths.

“A monster pretending to be a man,” Harry says, and his tongue is cloaked in shadowed breath. 

“Did he speak to you?” Louis asks, pressing, and as he watches, Harry trembles, and the aim of the barrel dips violently. 

“Corpse eyes,” Harry whispers, and the gun drops to his side, shoulders heaving up in an uncontrollable lurch. Louis is still, hands like bared knives digging into the edges of the cot, watching the man’s back and realizing he’s crying. 

“I’ve never seen - ” his voice is choked and frothing like an angry sea, and Louis is compelled to stand, to come forward and place a daggered hand on a shaking shoulder.

“Never seen something so malicious,” he finishes, and Louis’ grip feels like a dead fish, scaled and slimed and lying there uselessly. “It came out of the dusk like a shadow. Had this dead glow around it like smeared charcoal. It made the air around us smell like copper, and it smiled at me.” Harry’s legs waver and Louis has barely a second to react before his knees buckles, and staggering to the floor. Louis catches him around the waist and holds him upright for a moment before dragging him to the mattress and pushing him down. 

“Had teeth like an eel,” Harry turns his neck so quickly to find Louis’ eyes that he’s surprised when it doesn’t snap and loll limply to the side. “It made everything inside me turn to ice. I swear, it had pulled a mask skin over its face...” he shakes himself into silence and Louis finds one of his hands is crawling into his lap, and pulling Harry’s fingers into a stone-cold lock. 

“Pretending to be human,” Harry whispers, dropping his head onto Louis shoulders and breathing, warming him with petrified breath. 

“Am I,” Louis asks. It comes out tight and narrow. His throat has constricted, swollen with the scent of a stale heart, the scent of hot blood beneath sweat stained skin, the scent of the night, electric and alive around them. 

“Nothing like that thing,” Harry says, and his voice has become nothing more than a shelled vibration against Louis’ skin. The press of words makes him ache, and his fingers tighten. “I swear there’s still life in you.” 

Harry’s heart and lungs rattle beside Louis on the cot as he tries to will the words to be true.


	9. Chapter 9

The moon is fat in the sky, heavy, crushing, and staring up into it, Louis wonders if it’s going to fall from the sky. 

The wind blows, changing its direction with a subtle flare. With the change comes a smell. A sharp, canal-deep scent of a season’s change. 

 

Creeping out into the black after Harry had fallen asleep felt strange, like leaving a lover to meet another, and he hates the comparison, and so nearly gives in to the urge to turn tail and creep back beneath the blanket with the man. 

 

Harry’s strange plastic breathing had stopped being enough to block out the unborn voices in his head, incessant stones thrown against the windowpane of his mind, finally unignorable. 

Wandering down the black-lit path, the voices all alight in his skull;

 

_Come, come, into the night;_

_Come to me.._

 

The path he falls into feels wrong and wry - away from the trailer, and away from the road to the outskirts of the city. Away from the streetlights. Instead, to the sea, to the pier, to the waves, and the other waves - the ones made of white noise inside his head - are making him seasick. 

His feet pick up a pattern of small stones, and his pace creates a beat to match the words droning on and on inside his head.

_That’s it, that’s it... a little further…_

The contents of his stomach are running dry, save for the streaky residue from the heart, licked cleanly from his palms earlier. 

There’s no doubt in his mind that he’s going to find _it,_ that awful enigma haunting his strange new existence, tempting and terrible and seemingly unescapable, but when he finally does see the figure, he feels unprepared. 

He’s winding the bend towards the pier when he sees it, and his heart nearly stammers to life at the shock, though the dread in his stomach tells him that he knew this was coming. 

It’s just a man at first, until Harry’s terror comes back to him, and he sees what’s waiting beneath the surface of a human guise. Bones beneath the skin smoothed out in a not-quite human shape, straining the tissue overlaying them, brow bones coming out too far, and a slow poison stretch of a toothy smile. 

Louis’ mouth is dry as he digs his toes in, halting, frozen, staring. Feeling wan, feet clotting in his shoes. The thing before him is still too, hands folded together below its waist, the colour of sick starlight, just smiling in the dark. 

 

“Moonstruck, are we?” 

It speaks, and Louis’ skin crawls at the sound. It’s a lyrical accent, sounding as though the tongue shaping the words is used to wearing some ancient language, much older than the world Louis knows. The endless feeling spread out before him makes him quake. 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” it says next, and takes one fluid stride forward. Its features bark sharper, and Louis tries to back away. But his feet gripe and slide on the stones, and he dips sideways instead.

“Of course I’d find you wandering my haunt.” Undeterred, it comes closer still. Details jump out to Louis from the dimness of the cliffy night. He can see the mottled hairline of the thing, pale, grey-tinged skin blotting into a cap of black hair, pushing through its scalp like dead grass, softly peaked at the top. It smiles again as Louis’ wild eyes run across its figure, and there’s nothing there that resembles life. 

“Who are you,” Louis asks. Intimidation flees from his voice, and it rattles from between his teeth instead. It takes another step towards him - it moves like stop motion, both liquid and jarring. Closer now, and welded to the spot, Louis can see the shape of it, the awful impersonation of something that must have once been human. 

It’s skinny, limbs too long, like winter trees, or something sculpted from long-dead wood. There’s a push of muscle lying precariously atop the bones, all swathed in black. It’s wearing a strange, cloaking jacket that blends in with the night like lethal camouflage.

“I had a name, when I was young like you,” it says, and there’s another silver dagger flash of teeth, a lamprey grin, and the sharp points in Louis’ mouth feel like shallow filled stubs in comparison. “Fragile, names. A man can be many things, reign bright as a champion. Their names still die when they do. I do not claim such mortal things to be my own.” 

“What do you want from me,” Louis asks. The things ancient words fly high on evil wings above his head, and he grips his fists tight at his sides, wishing he held stones to case them away. 

The cursed smile spreads impossibly farther, until Louis is certain the skin is going to split, and locusts and beetles and crane flies will spill into the tight. 

It doesn’t answer this time. Instead, they circle each other like dogs. Louis can feel his hackles rising, his muscles turning hard and furious, with some strange cur of fear locking up around his spine. 

And the other circles fervently, patient but lit alive with energy, thin, bloodless lips parted on inhale, and Louis wonders if he’s smelling him, wonders what he’s smelling on him.

 

“You must be hungry. I see my latest offering didn’t suit your taste.” It speaks again once they’ve swapped positions; Louis with his back to the ocean, below the rickety wooden stairs. There’s a slight curl of an upper lip as the words are spoken - a touch of scorn, a sprinkling of disdain. 

“You need to eat. You’ve been hurt; you need to heal.” 

“There’s no amount of healing to reverse what you’ve done to me,” Louis spits out. It’s an adrenaline burst of courage that his body gorges itself on, and he can feel his face twisting to a snarl, spittle collecting at the corners of his mouth like a rabid and frothing beast. The much-too far away light from Harry’s lamppost is reflecting on their bodies, and Louis can see a washed out faded blue amid the black holes of the monster’s eyes.

“You’re new,” It says, ignoring Louis’ words and speaking sadly, and it lifts a hand to swim towards Louis’ chin. The movement doesn’t quite reach his skin, but it cups its hand gently, a quiet gesture. “Babies always burn.” 

The words don’t quite reach him, but linger a breath away, like the corpse’s hand, sweeping and sad, cradling the air beneath his face. 

“I can teach you.” 

The words are far away, swimming to the surface through black waters, and Louis takes a step back, trying to put more distance between them. He stumbles, his feet catching on his nerves, and once again, it smiles. 

“Still learning to walk. You’re so young. But I can teach you.” Its fingers come forward, sliding across the near-fluid fabric of Louis’ shirt. Looking down, Louis can see the black tipped peak of its nails, cuticles pushed back in frozen decay, fingers as white and thin as bleached bone. 

Louis backs away, body retreating down the cliffside, and when his foot makes contact with the first landing of the stairs, it’s with a hollow and foreboding _thunk._

“You took me from my grave,” he finally says. It’s without intensity, or power, but somehow in frailty the words sound as loud as the sea. The thing’s face shifts at this, a predatory shift into something softer, and it looks a little less like a monster for an instant. There’s a pause, a silent stretch, and the wind rips down through the cliffs, running atop the sand into the water, making waves.

Finally, it speaks.

“I didn’t like the clothes they buried you in.” It’s a quiet, almost tragic musing. Ancient wires connecting the etchings of their fingertips, and Louis is weak, his demeanor caving under the onslaught of newness and family. 

“You were put to rest in a cage of velvet and comfort,” It continues, and the ragweed voice is picking up strength and speed and fervor that makes Louis tremble beneath. “Clothed and coddled like a nursing pup; a fetus! An unformed body! And now...” It moves towards Louis through the shadows, a cold glide, weightless. 

“Now you’ve slept in the soil of your grave. Reborn, rising from the dirt and the weakness of the shell you used to wear.” 

“I wasn’t a shell. I was alive,” Louis says, a feral hiss that leaps from his throat and is born into the night, slimy and fetal to match. 

“You were unclean,” the thing is pressing. It’s firm, lavender and laced with patience, and the human costume suddenly looks threadbare in the pitch, loose at the collar and tearing at the seams. 

“I was _alive,”_ Louis whispers back, hot and fast and clouded over. 

“You’re alive with something new, now.” It steps closer, metal and muscle like storm clouds, and Louis feels iron hands grip his body and hold him under the waves. “Can’t you feel me inside you?” 

Louis shudders at the words, and at the man - the monster - winding a tight circle around him. His teeth spring from the roof of his mouth, tight and aching and tearing easily to make space for the ridged canines. 

“That voice in your head, that guide at your shoulder...” A mottled voice like frayed silk ebbs its way around Louis’ torso, a snake-tight grip crushing his ribcage and pulling him tight and close and narrow. 

“I made you, and you can feel me...” Insisting, insisting, pressure building from a wicked tongue, but there’s nothing, no warmth, no fire or feel of comfort in the dark. Just the iron press of cruel hands against his body, and a strange, fish-blue shimmer in the crevice holes of black eyes. 

Louis’ hands move outwards, suddenly frantic to be anchored to something, and they catch on the rickety rail of the stairs. A backwards glance shows a wooden descent, gaps and splinters and the terrible roar of the ocean lapping at the sand below. Steep, old, and the thing advancing on him jagged and older still. 

“My creation, _mine,”_ black serpents of sounds come slithered from the thing’s mouth - Louis can see the god-awful grey of its gums between swirling rows of needle-like teeth, and the wooden boards beneath his feet cry out. A creaking whine of fear that Louis swallows with the soles of his shoes, and feels down to his core. 

The wind is pushing the creature’s scent into his lungs. It smells of earthy decay and spun gold, cobwebs and blood and satin.

“Come to me,” it whispers, this time inside Louis’ head as well as around him, and he feels small, drawn, transfixed and tortured by the otherworldly gleam in its eyes. His feet feel almost hypnotized to follow the sound, like fish into unseen netting, but a sound stops him.

It’s nothing more than dragging footsteps at first, but just as it registers in Louis’ ears, it turns to a sharp crack of inhuman screaming. A high, clear, penetrating sound ripping out and ringing on repeat in Louis’ ears, deafening, like shattered crystalline. 

 

The sound retreats before the shock does, but when they both fade, Louis finds it’s a comfortless relief to see a mortal shape. 

 

Harry - slack boned, hands twisted around the shotgun, the tip exhaling a toxic trail. Even several spaces away, in the dark Louis can see the way his body shivers, from the cold, from the sight before him. 

The shells had wheeled off into the night, not striking flesh, but instead catching the edges of the thing’s black cloak, chewing off tiny pieces before blasting into the handrail. Tiny pieces of wood slice into Louis’ sleeve, and the creaking beneath his feet morph into a wounded groan as the air clears. The creature has whirled around to take in the new form in the black, and Louis’ lips have parted to let the night air into his mouth. Gunpowder and blood and carnal fear come swimming across his tongue, bitter and beautiful. 

 

The monster turns slowly, a calculated, pissed-off pirouette. It comes to rest, and drinks in Harry’s form: out of breath, with fractured posture and a smoking gun. 

“Foolish, half-dead human,” the things says, lips practically peeling off the skull to sneer. “You missed.”

There’s a telling, knowing, terrified intelligence in Harry’s eyes, and he cocks the gun and plants his feet in the uneven rocks.


	10. Chapter 10

“I won’t miss again,” Harry says, and there’s a determined set to his jaw that Louis doesn’t recognize - no rush to his movements. White fear is spread across his face like turpentine but it doesn’t infect his hands, so steady and calm. His quiet words are lost to the sea.

 

And the creature speaks above him, unholy and cataclysmic. 

_“YOU ARE NOT WELCOME IN HIS WORLD ANYMORE,”_ the monster screams, and Louis feels as if red hot hands are coiling around his intestines and pulling them out. It’s a feeling that keeps him rooted in place as the thing lunges forwards, towards Harry, towards the barrel of the gun. 

 

Another shot rings out, gut-deep and crackling. The heavens are turning grey and sour, appalled by the sound.

 

Louis waits for flesh and gore to come out from the thing’s back in a wicked spray, as bloody and twisted as a coffin birth. 

 

Instead, there’s just torn fabric and a ghostly trail of grey smoke. Then laughter, and the noise is nails on stone, teeth against glass, electricity and water. 

Harry doesn’t hesitate, his muscles a wildly shaking lock of terror but he lurches back and swings forward towards the laughing demon. The butt of the shotgun connects with its face, so malformed and wholly un-human.

 

This time there is a gory spray - a tangled crimson string of archaic gaelic curses as it’s face crumples slightly upon impact. There’s a bony crunch, and Louis flinches at how blunt and cruel the noise is. It was an unexpected attack - he can see on the monster’s face how unprepared it was for an assault, and the pure force of surprise knocks it backwards, towards the fraying edge of the wooden stairs. 

He can see it on Harry’s face too, how ready for backlash the man is, how crazed and petrified and set in stone he is. 

There’s a moment, a gasp of time as Harry drops the gun - too heavy for his wracking lungs to support, and the dropped weight acts as an anchor as he leaps forward, breath barely caught. It’s a swift train of movement that has Louis frozen in awe - the sickly speed of the man, the way death is reflected in those haunted eyes, green and grey and grizzled in the face of something dreadful. 

 

Harry is silent as he runs forward, quiet and awful, like slipping below the sea line. Louis watches as his body connects with the monster, slamming together and interlocking like jagged glass, tumbled down to something dull and gleaming. 

 

Louis watches, seasick, as their limbs lock like the talons of rival hawks. The driving force of their bodies is coming towards where he’s stood on the edge of the stairs, and the railing Louis goes to grab for disintegrates beneath his touch. 

The supporting beam running down below the first steps has crumbled - ancient wood blown to pieces by a shotgun shell, _but it thought that you missed your shot_ \- and Louis falls to the side, grabbing at the wooden planks still somewhat attached to the rocky side. 

 

All the night’s air collected in his lungs flees his body as he watches them crash. The stairs are quick to fall and crumble, so eager to turn to dust and be flung into the hungry sea below. 

 

And the tangled bodies fall too. 

One twisted, lived, unliving, as old as the cliff that’s consuming them in their fall. And one mortal, battered, sick and hot and breathing, pneumonia and sleepless terror eating away at pink capillaries. 

Together, they go over the edge and topple down onto the pier below, held up by sand, bits of wood and rock raining down where the steps used to descend.

 

There’s a godless scream, quickly chased by a noise that Louis refuses to think of as coming from something alive. A thin, piercing sound, like a spike driven through a tire, and all the air escaping. It goes on for forever, and when it stops, all he can hear is the pounding surge of the sea, breaking down the cliffs, piece by tiny piece. 

 

↶↶↶

He finds his unfueled body takes too long to make the descent. Gravel skids beneath the soles of his shoes, and showers of stones clatter down before him. It’s a rolling motion, following the broken bits of stair down to where it comes to rest, becoming the pier, flat and whole again, and reaching out with spindling wooden fingers to kiss the waves.

The terrible thing is waiting for him at the end of his descent. Eyes open, lids peeled back, staring up but not seeing the stars. 

For the first time, Louis can see something frail in the thing’s form. So carefully crafted, a perfect predator, suddenly stitched from frailty, teeth becoming paper shapes, thin and small. A butterfly, wings stretched but flightless, pinned to a cork board.

The image of delicacy fades, and Louis is left taking in the destruction. Not pins, and not translucent wings. Instead a jagged, splintered spike of broken wood. Instead of a sliver of shining wing, a torso, stretched and strange but still very much flesh, penetrable, and now skewered. 

A broken railing stuck through the centre of its chest cavity, caved in. At the wound’s jagged edges, Louis can see it’s a grisly, greying off-red colour inside. Dried up, like dead leaves in the gutter. Its mouth is twisted, spent, lips jarred up in a final jeer, and Louis feels a creeping wave pass through him. A tired sigh of a night crawling to a close.

All around him on the beach is ruins. The broken bits of stair already falling claim to the tide, slowly taking in water. Slowly wading out to sea, becoming driftwood. 

 

The wet edges of the pier seem to sing. 

 

There’s a ragged, desperate hollow feeling edging back into Louis’ body. The same lost sensation he had felt when grave soil was slipping off from his skin, between his fingers.

 

Harry has fallen, or rolled, onto his back. So intact upon first glance that Louis feels a strange yellow tugging that he names hope; a porcelain figure laid out on a stretch of sand. 

The same feeling is eaten by the wind. A stray balloon, swept up by the cold rush of winter’s wind, consumed by the horizon and lost to the fading night.

 

Motionless, it’s almost worse to find he’s not dead. _Not dead yet,_ Louis thinks, a little brokenly, the white noise of the waves suddenly switching off and out of his head. The new sound takes over, louder, blacker, more consuming, and it’s worse.

That same punctured tire noise. Air dragging into fallen lungs, air snaking out through so many little holes. 

Harry’s eyes seem to find him before his senses do, and slowly, Louis kneels. The knees of his trousers soak up the saltwater, and the thirst worsens. Moisture flees his lips and tongue, and collects halfway down his throat, clogged and thick and choking. 

Distantly - as distant as the dawn’s light leaking into the cloud cover - the copper smell of blood leaks into Louis’ skin. It’s there, but hidden, and numbly, he finds it’s from something inside. Harry, bleeding out, but the fabric of his skin binding it tight, holding on to it tightly. It makes Louis’ head go thick with want and worry. So close to the dead eyes of the monster, he finds he’s mutely grateful that worry is still there inside his self, to be felt at all. 

There’s an awful lurch in Harry’s body, and as Louis watches, he stirs, strangled on the sand. Paralyzed, caught in the light discarded down from the moon. 

A wet, grainy sound, and Louis finds his bearings, and outstretches his hands. Harry’s skin feels pale beneath his fingertips, and he tries to speak.

First it’s just a an ugly sound, like water being sucked down a storm drain. Time drags, sandpaper across skin, and the ugliness shapes itself into words.

“Tell me, it’s dead?” Separated by cruelly long gaps filled with the collapse of trying organs, Harry’s words sink poisoned barbs into Louis’ hands. 

“Dead,” Louis repeats. There’s no sensation in his lips, and the word drops like a lead ball onto the wet sand around them. From the paranoid corners of his eyes, the creature’s corpse holds no movement, not a twitch, not a spark of evil left to contaminate. 

Impossibly, a smile is sewn onto Harry’s face. Whiter than the moonlight, as endless as the sea. It’s a tortured look of relief, and something Louis finds he hasn’t seen or felt or found since his awakening. Peace, with calloused edges.

“Can you help me?” Harry asks, wet words, and Louis feels frozen at the roots, clammy, like a cold sweat has erupted on his skin. He tries to speak, digging through his skull for something useful. At first there’s nothing, but then there are words, imploring. Inside his head, no longer a snaking violent voice, but instead Harry’s own words, calling back to him from under yellow lamp light. 

_Do you need some help getting clean?_

Then, a locking rush of helplessness, an empty void telling him that there’s nothing in the world that can wash the damage done from his skin. 

He thinks: _God, no, I don’t know how,_ and Harry speaks again, waterlogged. 

“Can you help me feel - ” he’s cut off by his own lungs, gasping and drowning and he wrenches himself to the side, spits out a coughing ripple of blood and liquid from deep inside, and Louis’ head churns. Controlled by an urge he doesn’t want to stake claim to, Louis leans in, leers in, and runs his tongue, dry and harsh and desperate, across Harry’s lower lip and chin. Harry hisses out a red-tinged exhale, and Louis swallows it, dripping a black apology onto the sand, where it’s swallowed too. 

“Make me feel like the sea feels,” Harry mouths once Louis’ swallowed down the taste of him. It burns all the way down, like fevered liquor. The words worm into Louis’ mouth, and he can feel their weight in the teeth sprigging down from his ratty gums. 

It takes a breath before he understands what he’s being asked. The slick taste inside his mouth is clouding his eyes and his head, and kneeling there he finds he wants to oblige.

Before he can, his tongue and teeth are snaking in and forward, hungry, and lapping at the dribble of blood staining the corner of Harry’s mouth. 

“I’m taking you home,” he breathes, and as the words reach Harry’s ears, his eyes close to slits. He’s losing consciousness, Louis can tell from the way the weight of his head is dipping to the side, breathing coming out less strangled and more like damp leather. 

 

He finds the tremble in his arms isn’t enough to stop him from lifting Harry’s body. He sways, but his posture holds. Harry’s eyes flicker, rolling back before closing entirely, and he falls limp, deadweight but still breathing. Louis stills as it happens, and the numbness in his feet and hands is replaced with a chilling coil of power. It’s borderline wave of deadliness, and he tries to press it down. 

 

It’s a steep, winding trail back to the trailer hitch beneath the lamppost in the night, and he braces his legs and curls his hands a little tighter around the warm body in his arms. 

 

↶↶↶

Harry looks small once he’s been laid out on the cot inside the single room. He’s curling inwards at the edges, and Louis feels vast enough to consume the whole sight. The bareness of the lightbulb, the expression on the man’s face, still and surely not dreaming as the rise and fall of his chest struggles on. 

The feeling of vastness extends to his core and his stomach too - empty. It’s a dangerous feeling and he lets the swarm of it rattle through his bones a while before trying to quiet it again. 

 

He chews down on his bottom lip. There’s a startlingly sharp tang of brilliance - a white hot prick, then heat. His tongue slippery and coated, and he swallows down the sensation. Birds are stretching out their wings in his stomach, and he’s not sure if it’s better than the hollowness before.

It’s enough to battle down the urge to drain the dying man, but doesn’t prove strong enough to fight off the need to leak the flavour into his mouth again. He lowers himself over the edge of the cot, feeling the animal way his lip peels away from his teeth and he sucks the scent into his open mouth. His hand comes to rest on the curl of Harry’s arm. It’s too much, the smell too red and ripe, and the push of his teeth come forward too.

Harry’s head rolls gently to one side at the movement, and rather than pulling away, he parts his lips, and presses a kiss into the onslaught of Louis’ mouth. It’s weak and soft and Louis reels softly too, head suddenly filled with the image of a bouquet of red roses, laying at his feet in the dark as he uncurls too. 

He kisses back for a breath, thinking of rose petals, and Harry swallows when he pulls away again. 

“Is that it?” Harry asks, lungs like torn sails. Louis doesn’t know, and doesn’t have an answer waiting. Instead, he pulls his unwilling hands from Harry’s skin, and leaves the trailer with its smell of sorrow. Leaves the trailer and walks back into the failing night, thinking of flowers and of the sea. 

 

He’s not sure what came into him that fed him the strength to leave, but it’s hate and severity that latches to his limbs and makes him walk - back to the pier, back into the end of the night where the body of a thing is waiting. 

 

↶↶↶

 

Louis has to tear the broken wooden beam from the creature’s chest before he can lift the body. There’s twisted comfort, in seeing how easily the haughty veil of darkness was torn from its body, but nothing of the sort when his hands slip and fall into the wound. There’s no desire or hunger or any breed of want when his fingers come away damp and coated in an ashy pink. The inside of the hole is strangely grey and textured like a plucked bird. He wonders if that’s how he is inside, or how he’ll become. 

As he carries the wretched thing back up the incline, back up the winding trail, the sharp turn, the rocky path, he wonders if there’s enough of nature left in it to rot. 

 

↶↶↶

 

The tide slides in, wordless and wretched, and with it comes the rhythmic sound of digging, the dull churning of soft earth.

This time, it’s with the damp sound of dirty palms, and the noise of grit as soil is caught beneath fingernails. 

 

He drops the body without grace, without guilt, into the dirt beneath his headstone. Toiled too many times, but he thinks to himself that nothing will ever grow from this one slot of earth again. Perhaps for the best. 

That godless urging is back in Louis’ mouth and spiraling down his spinal cord. 

 

He gives in, and chews the monster’s tongue from its mouth. Swallows down silence. His hands feel clawed and crimson red as he brings the dirt back down overtop the thing. 

 

All around him, even the branches of the ever-watching trees feel hungry.

 

↶↶↶

 

His skin feels stretched and stained as he sets his feet back to the familiar trail. It’s close to dawn, but there’s nothing too close to fear left inside him anymore. He wonders if the sun will find him as he rides the trail back to the trailer hitch, sitting solitary beneath that lamp post, all yellow and ready for him. 

As he runs and as he wonders, he feels like laughter wouldn’t be ill suited on his tongue. There’s a feeling not unlike weightlessness reaching back into his head, and a taste of warmth and pink breath.

 

↶↶↶

 

The trailer is there when he finally rounds the bend. The lamp post looks his way, reproachful. The only one, only thing still really standing. Door still unlocked, he enters, the closest to being afraid in what feels like much too long.

Unsure of what is lying there to be found, he swims through the shadows, comes to rest at the side of the cot. 

 

Harry’s eyes are unable to lock on to anything, but they search for his form, unsteady and so bloodshot. Louis’ hands coast out and find his. Cold skin meets sallow, and Louis feels the tired beat at Harry’s wrist. Soft as butterfly wings.

 

That sweet rot smell of his own skin, styrofoam and stretched plastic. 

 

Louis lowers himself to the floor and watches as Harry strains to focus his gaze. His cheeks are flushed, two red hot dots of colour on a fading face, the rest of it washed out. _Ghostly,_ Louis thinks, shivers.

_“Like...seawater,”_ Harry rasps. Louis drinks in the words and the brine chokes him.

 

Ears acute, and pinpointed on the shallow rise and fall of Harry’s chest, he sits and listens, helpless and terrible, as the ragged sound of torn lung slowly, wetly, fades to silence.

Silence, and he’s left sitting in the dark with a corpse.


	11. Epilogue

Twilight stains the sky red. Red as roses, and as the crows settle into their roosts and sailor's rejoice, Louis stirs. A new awakening, and the sharpness in the winter air filters into his skin as his eyes open. 

They open to find eyes looking back at him. Almost sharp in their vibrance, alive - or something close - in powdered greens.

 

There is no sound of Cellophane lungs, or vehemence. There is no sound at all. 

 

And around them, all around them, silver.


End file.
